If Beijing is China's imperial present and Shanghai its futuristic showcase, Xi'an is its oldest memory. For more than a thousand years, under the name Chang'an ('eternal peace'), it was the capital of thirteen dynasties and one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities on the planet: the eastern end of the Silk Road, where Persian merchants, Buddhist monks, Central Asian musicians and spice-laden caravans arrived. Walking through Xi'an is a glimpse into the heart of Chinese civilisation, at the exact spot where the country's first unified empire was born.
Its worldwide symbol is, of course, the Terracotta Army: the thousands of life-size clay soldiers that a farmer stumbled upon in 1974 while digging a well, and that have guarded the first emperor's tomb for more than two thousand years. But Xi'an is much more: the only major Chinese city that still has its complete medieval wall, which you can walk or cycle all the way round; a bustling Muslim Quarter where the Hui community cooks noodles, skewers and breads in the spirit of the Silk Road; and Buddhist pagodas that keep alive the memory of the monks who brought the sutras from India.
This guide explores Xi'an with a practical and warm eye: how to organise your visit to the warriors without wasting time, how to make the most of the walled old town, where to eat the legendary dishes of the Muslim Quarter and how to get around a huge but surprisingly manageable city. Xi'an is usually visited in two or three days, as a stop between Beijing and the west, and it almost always leaves travellers wishing they had stayed longer.
Xi'an, the ancient Chang'an, is one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation. One of the country's oldest Neolithic cultures flourished nearby (Banpo, some 6.000 years ago), and here, in the 3rd century BC, the king of Qin conquered the other kingdoms and proclaimed himself Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of a unified China; for his afterlife he had the gigantic terracotta army buried. Under the Han (206 BC-220 AD) and above all the Tang (618-907 AD) dynasties, Chang'an became the largest metropolis in the world, with more than a million inhabitants, the starting point of the Silk Road and a melting pot of religions and cultures. The fall of the Tang and the shift of power eastwards reduced the city's prominence, but in the 14th century the Ming emperors built the formidable wall that still surrounds it. In the 20th century, Xi'an was the scene of the 1936 'Xi'an Incident', a turning point in the war against Japan, and the discovery of the warriors in 1974 put it back on the world map. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓From the heart of the Silk Road in Xi'an to the fertile Sichuan basin and the Tibetan plateau: inland China of ancient capitals, pandas and the roof of the world.
Read the history of The interior and the west (Tibet) →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Xi'an's story begins long before China existed as an empire. Along the banks of the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River, archaeologists have found some of the oldest and best-studied human settlements in the country. The most famous is Banpo, a Neolithic village of the Yangshao culture inhabited some 6,000 years ago. Its remains (half-buried houses, pottery kilns, tombs and tools) are preserved today in a museum on the outskirts of the city. That community of farmers, who grew millet and made painted pots, bears witness to the origins of civilisation along the Yellow River valley, considered one of the cradles of humanity.
The fertile Wei plain and its strategic position, sheltered by mountains and natural passes, made this region a magnet for political power. Around the 11th century BC, the Western Zhou dynasty set up its twin capitals, Feng and Hao, very close to present-day Xi'an. It was under the Zhou that many of China's cultural foundations took shape: the rituals, writing on bronze, the idea of the 'Mandate of Heaven' that gave rulers their legitimacy, and much of the thinking that Confucius would later gather together.
So, long before it became the most dazzling imperial capital in Asia, this land had already seen the birth of institutions, beliefs and forms of organisation that would define Chinese civilisation for millennia. It's no coincidence that when the time came to unify the country, the force that did it set out from right here, from the kingdom of Qin.
In the 3rd century BC, China was split into kingdoms that had been fighting one another for centuries, the so-called 'Warring States period'. Of them all, the kingdom of Qin, with its capital in this region, was the most disciplined, militarised and ruthlessly effective. Under its king, Ying Zheng, Qin conquered its rivals one after another until, in 221 BC, it completed the unification of China. Ying Zheng then took a new title to match his achievement: Qin Shi Huang, 'First Emperor of Qin'. The first Chinese empire was born.
His reign was as short as it was transformative. In little more than a decade, Qin Shi Huang standardised writing, currency, weights, measures and even the width of cart axles; he linked up and extended the northern defensive walls that would become the seed of the Great Wall; and he organised the empire into a centralised system of commanderies run by officials rather than hereditary nobles. He was also a brutal ruler: he imposed massive forced labour, persecuted intellectuals and, according to tradition, ordered books burned and scholars who opposed him buried.
Obsessed with immortality and with his own power in the afterlife, he had a colossal mausoleum built at the foot of Mount Li. To guard it for eternity, he had an army of more than 8,000 life-size terracotta soldiers made and buried, each with a different face, together with horses, chariots and bronze weapons. That marvel lay hidden and forgotten for more than two thousand years, until in 1974 some farmers digging a well brought it back to light, making it one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century.
After the fall of the short-lived Qin dynasty, the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) set up its capital very close to here and gave it the name that would make it legendary: Chang'an, 'eternal peace'. It was under the Han that the Silk Road officially opened: the emperor sent the diplomat Zhang Qian westward, and those missions gave rise to the great caravan network linking China with Central Asia, Persia and, ultimately, the Roman Mediterranean. Chang'an thus became the eastern end of one of the most important trade and cultural routes in history.
But the absolute peak came with the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), considered a golden age of Chinese civilisation. Tang Chang'an was very probably the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the world in its day: an estimated one million people lived within its walls and in the surrounding area. It was laid out like a huge chessboard, with straight avenues, walled wards, markets, palaces and temples. Its streets were shared by Persian and Sogdian merchants, Buddhist monks, musicians from Central Asia, Nestorian Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Muslims: an astonishing religious and ethnic diversity for the time.
That brilliant Chang'an has left key traces behind. The Giant Wild Goose Pagoda was built to house the sutras the monk Xuanzang brought back from India after an epic journey. The Great Mosque has its roots in the Muslim community of the Silk Road, ancestors of the Hui who still bring the Muslim Quarter to life today. And the Shaanxi History Museum holds the exquisite three-colour ceramics, metalwork and paintings that give a sense of how refined that world was.
Chang'an's splendour didn't last forever. The Tang dynasty fell into crisis in the 8th century with the devastating An Lushan rebellion and finally collapsed at the start of the 10th century. With its fall, China's political and economic centre of gravity shifted east and south, towards cities such as Luoyang, Kaifeng and later the prosperous cities of the Yangtze delta. Chang'an lost its rank as imperial capital and, with it, much of its population and grandeur. For centuries it remained an important provincial city, but no longer the heart of the Chinese world.
The name 'Xi'an', meaning 'western peace', became established under the Ming dynasty in the 14th century. That was when the city received the monument that defines it physically today: its formidable wall. The first Ming emperor, Hongwu, had a new wall of rammed earth and brick built in the 1370s on the foundations of earlier fortifications. With a perimeter of almost 14 kilometres, a height of 12 to 18 metres, watchtowers, a moat and four great gates, it became one of the most imposing urban defences in China.
What's remarkable is that this wall has survived almost intact to this day, something exceptional in a country where most city walls were torn down in the 20th century to make way for modern growth. Restored and well looked after, the Xi'an city wall is today the most complete surviving wall from imperial China and one of the city's great attractions: a ring of history that still wraps around the old town and that you can walk or cycle.
In the 20th century, Xi'an once again took centre stage in Chinese history, for two very different reasons. The first was political and military: in December 1936 the so-called 'Xi'an Incident' took place here. The Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, determined to crush the Communists before confronting the Japanese invasion, was detained in the city by his own generals. The tense, dangerous crisis ended up forcing a truce and the formation of a united front between Nationalists and Communists against Japan, a decisive turn in the course of the war and, in the long run, of 20th-century Chinese history.
The second reason was archaeological, and it changed the city's image around the world for good. In March 1974, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, a group of farmers digging a well in search of water near Mount Li, east of Xi'an, unearthed fragments of clay figures. The archaeologists who came to the site soon grasped the scale of the find: they had discovered the First Emperor's terracotta army, buried there for more than two thousand years. The excavations brought thousands of warriors to light, and the site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
Since then, Xi'an has combined its enormous historical weight with breakneck modern development. Today it is a metropolis of more than twelve million people, an industrial, university and technology hub in inland China, connected to the whole country by high-speed trains. But its identity remains anchored in the past: the city that was capital of thirteen dynasties, starting point of the Silk Road and guardian of the most famous clay army on the planet welcomes millions of travellers every year who come to walk on its centuries-old wall and look Qin Shi Huang's soldiers in the eye.
