5 Days in Xi'an

The Bell Tower (Zhonglou) stands on a traffic island at the exact center of the old city, where the four main avenues cross. It was built in 1384 under the first Ming emperor, and it didn't start out here: in 1582 it was moved to the new center, because the city's middle had drifted east. Its bell marked the morning, and the drum of the tower next door marked the evening.

Walk up for the view of the avenues and the wall. The interior is small, so give it 45 minutes, not two hours.

A few minutes' walk west, the Drum Tower marks the gateway to the Muslim Quarter. It's the older of the pair, built in 1380, and the two worked as a team: bell for dawn, drum for dusk. Inside are 24 small drums for the 24 solar terms of the traditional calendar and a huge cowhide drum made in 1996, played in short daily shows.

Pick one tower if you're short on time. The Bell Tower has the better view of the avenues, the Drum Tower has the drums and the view down into the Muslim Quarter. The combined ticket is the better deal if you want both.

Walk north onto Beiyuanmen, the main street of the Muslim Quarter, for a second breakfast. Guantang baozi are steamed buns filled with meat and hot broth, Xi'an's answer to Shanghai's xiaolongbao, only bigger. Jia San, a soup-bun specialist with a branch on Beiyuanmen just behind the Drum Tower, is the usual first stop.

Order a basket to share, bite a small hole first, sip the broth, then eat. Save room: you have a mosque, noodles and the wall ahead.

Tucked into the lanes behind Beiyuanmen, the Great Mosque is one of the largest old mosques in China, and it doesn't look like a mosque. Tradition dates it to 742, when Xi'an was Chang'an, but most of what you see was built in 1392 under the Ming. Five courtyards run along an east-west axis, with pavilions, steles and carved wood, and the prayer hall at the far west end, built the way a Chinese temple is built.

It's a working mosque for the Hui community, so dress modestly, keep your voice down, and don't expect to enter the prayer hall, which is for Muslims only. Go before noon, when it's quiet and the courtyards have the best light.

Lunch is the dish that gave computers a headache: biangbiang noodles. They're hand-pulled, belt-wide, and topped with chili oil, garlic, scallion and vinegar, and the name imitates the sound of dough slapped on the counter. The character for biang has 42 strokes in simplified Chinese (58 in the traditional form) and only entered Unicode in 2020.

Eat where there's a queue of locals, not at the places with someone outside waving a laminated menu. The side lanes off Beiyuanmen are cheaper than the main street. Mix everything thoroughly before the first bite.

The Xi'an City Wall is one of the oldest, largest and best preserved city walls in China: 13.74 km around, 12 meters high, 12 to 14 meters wide on top. Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming emperor, started it in 1370, building over the older Tang walls in the south and west, and it took about eight years. The brick facing came in 1568, the last big rebuilding in 1983. Most Chinese cities pulled their walls down in the twentieth century, and this one stayed.

The best way to see it is on two wheels. Go up at the South Gate (Yongning Gate), where bikes are rented, and ride the loop. Bike hire is around 45 yuan for three hours plus a deposit, so ask at the desk. The brick surface is bumpy and slower than you'd think, so allow two hours. Inside you look down on rooftops, outside on the moat and the ring road, and the golden-hour light is the reason to come late: the sun sets a little before 6pm in late October. On foot the loop takes about four hours, and one stretch of wall looks much like the next.

Dinner is yangrou paomo, the dish Xi'an would pick if it had to choose one. The kitchen hands you a flat round bread (mo) and a bowl, and you tear the bread into pieces about the size of a thumb joint, hand it back and wait while the cook adds lamb broth, meat and glass noodles. The broth is simmered for hours with Sichuan pepper, star anise and cinnamon, and pickled sweet garlic and chili sauce go on the side. The tearing is the point: it's a dish you earn.

Lao Sun Jia, which dates to 1898, is the best-known old name for it, and Tongshengxiang, on the square between the towers, is another long-running choice. After dinner, walk Beiyuanmen past the stalls selling lamb skewers and shibing, fried persimmon cakes.

In March 1974 farmers digging a well found pieces of terracotta, and the Terracotta Army came up out of the ground. The soldiers were buried around 210 BC to guard the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who had begun work on his tomb at 13. The three pits hold thousands of life-size soldiers, horses and chariots, and the figures differ in rank, face and hair. Pit 1 is the one that stops people: a hangar over a pit 230 meters long and 62 wide, with the army in eleven corridors facing east, toward the states he conquered.

Take the big view from the rail first, then work around the sides, where you see the faces. You won't walk among the figures, and the honest reaction is that the scale is staggering, the crowds are heavy and you'll often be looking at the back of someone's phone. The figures were painted, and the lacquer began to curl within seconds of meeting the dry air, which is why you see bare grey clay today.

Walk on to the other halls. Pit 2 is smaller than Pit 1 but, by the museum's own description, richer and more varied: an L-shaped pit with cavalry, archers, chariots and infantry together, estimated at over 1,300 figures and horses. Pit 3 is small, with 72 figures and horses, and scholars think it was the army's command post. The Bronze Chariots hall shows two bronze carriages at half scale, each with four horses, with gold and silver fittings.

The same ticket covers the Lishan Garden, the park around the emperor's tomb mound, with a free shuttle between the two. The tomb itself has never been opened. The historian Sima Qian wrote that it holds rivers of mercury, and high mercury levels have since turned up in the soil of the mound. Visit the garden only if you have energy left: the mound is a green hill, and the army is the draw.

Lintong is known for its pomegranates, which are in the stalls in autumn, whole or pressed to order. Eat lunch in Lintong town on the way to Huaqing Palace instead of at the restaurants right by the army's gates, which are aimed at tour groups and priced to match: noodles or a roujiamo from the shop with a line of workers at noon.

Huaqing Palace (also called Huaqing Pool) sits at the foot of Mount Li around natural hot springs that rulers have built on for almost three thousand years. The Tang Emperor Xuanzong renovated it in 723 and renamed it Huaqing Palace in 747, and it's the setting of his romance with his consort Yang Guifei. It ended when the imperial guards, fleeing the An Lushan Rebellion, mutinied and demanded her death, and the emperor gave in. The poet Bai Juyi turned the story into The Song of Everlasting Regret.

What you'll see is a restored garden: the Lotus Pool, the Guifei Pool, bath halls and a statue of her. The better history is the 1936 one. Chiang Kai-shek was staying here, and before dawn on 12 December soldiers sent by two of his generals, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, stormed the compound. Chiang ran out of a window, climbed the wall, lost his false teeth and one shoe, and fled up the snowy mountain. He was found a few hours later. The Xi'an Incident ended on 25 December with his release and a ceasefire that led to a united front against Japan.

Behind the hot springs, a path climbs Mount Li to the Bingjian Pavilion (Bingjian Ting), built where Chiang Kai-shek's captors found him in 1936. The Nationalist government first called it the National Resurrection Pavilion, and it has been renamed twice since, the last time in the 1980s. Stand there and look down at the compound he fled, and the story becomes physical in a way the palace rooms don't manage. It also gets you above the tour groups for a while.

The Shaanxi History Museum turns the sights of the last two days into a story. It opened in 1991 in a Tang-style building and holds over 1.7 million objects, and the permanent galleries walk you from the Neolithic through the Zhou, Qin and Han to the golden age of the Tang. The highlights are the Tang hoard from Hejia Village (buried around 755 during the An Lushan Rebellion), the Kneeling Archer from the Qin emperor's tomb and a Tang mural of men playing polo.

Go early: the layout is chronological and works without a guide. The Tang tomb murals have their own hall and a separate ticket, and they're the best thing in the building if you have the time.

Lunch is the classic cheap Shaanxi combo, often sold as a set: roujiamo, braised meat chopped fine and stuffed into a crisp flatbread (China's answer to the hamburger), plus liangpi, cold noodles in chili oil and vinegar, plus a bottle of Ice Peak (Bingfeng) soda. The meat is usually pork, but in Muslim areas it's beef with cumin. The streets around Xiaozhai metro station are full of small shops, so pick one with a queue and a grill.

Head about 2 km southeast, a 25-minute walk or a short metro ride, to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, the symbol of the city. It was first built in 652 in the Daci'en Temple, under the monk Xuanzang, to store the Buddhist scriptures and images he had brought back from India. His journey along the Silk Road, and the legends that grew up around it, inspired the Ming novel Journey to the West. The original five-storey tower was rebuilt under Empress Wu Zetian, and the brick pagoda you see now reflects major Ming work.

The temple grounds are calm and worth the ticket by themselves. Climb the pagoda only if the line is short: the view over the city is the reward, and the stairs are narrow. It's part of the UNESCO Silk Roads listing.

A kilometer southeast of the pagoda, Tang Paradise (Datang Furong Yuan) is a theme park in the spirit of the Tang imperial garden, near the old Qujiang Pool. It opened in 2005 around a large lake and a tall tower, and it's a modern interpretation, not a reconstruction. It's the one stop in this plan you can skip without a pang.

Go for the evening lake show. If you'd rather save the money, free Datang Everbright City is the better use of the evening.

Datang Everbright City (Datang Bu Ye Cheng, "Great Tang Never-Night City") is the pedestrian avenue running south from the pagoda, which Xi'an lights up each evening. Statues of Tang figures line the street, performers in period costume work the crowds and the pagoda glows at one end. On the pagoda's north plaza, a music fountain plays in the evenings.

It's glitzy, crowded and entirely modern, a Tang pastiche, and a good place to end the day all the same. Go at dusk, walk the length, eat from a stall and move on before the crowd peaks.

Mount Hua is the Western Mountain of China's Five Great Mountains, 2,155 meters at its South Peak, and a Daoist holy place for about two thousand years. The Tang emperors made it their family's sacred mountain. The traditional trail from the village takes 4 to 6 hours to the North Peak, and most visitors skip that with the North Peak cable car (around 80 yuan one way).

From the North Peak (1,615 m) the path climbs along the Canglong Ridge, a narrow granite spine with drops on both sides that was long the only way to the main peaks. A second trail around it was built in the 1980s, and the exposed sections now have steps cut in the rock and railings. It still has a reputation as one of the world's more dangerous hikes, so treat it as a serious day out, not a stroll. Some Chinese climbers go at night to reach the East Peak by sunrise, which turns it into an overnight trip.

The plank walk (Changkong Zhandao, the "sky plank road") is what made Huashan an internet legend: a path of narrow planks fixed to a sheer cliff face, far above the valley. Today you clip a harness onto a safety cable and shuffle along in single file, so it's the same cliff, safer, slower and much more crowded than the old videos suggest. It's just below the South Peak, a short walk from the West Peak cable car station.

Honest verdict: it's a thrill and a photo, not a hike. The queue can take longer than the walk, and the person in front of you sets your pace. If heights freeze your legs, skip it, because the views from the peaks are as good.

The West Peak (Lotus Peak, 2,082 meters) is where most people finish: a viewpoint over the cliffs and the cable car station for the ride down. It's the pricier of the two cable cars, around 140 yuan one way in season, and it saves your knees after a day of stairs.

Check the time of the last cable car before you set out, so you don't learn at 5pm that the queue is two hours and the train home is in three. Keep a margin for the shuttle bus and the station, and pack food, since the sun sets a little before 6pm.

After eight hours of stairs, the answer is a table where the food arrives in a pot. Xi'an isn't a hot pot city (that belongs to Chengdu and Chongqing), but the Sichuan-style version is easy to find: a bubbling broth in the middle of the table, thin slices of lamb and beef, tofu and vegetables to dip. Pick an independent shop near the South Gate over a big chain, and order a mild broth, because the numbing kind catches the unwary.

The Beilin Museum, known as the Stele Forest, is a library carved in stone. It dates to 1087, when the Confucian classics that the Tang had carved on 114 stones in the 830s, more than 650,000 characters in all, were set up in the city's Confucian temple. It has grown into nearly three thousand steles, in buildings that are mostly Ming and Qing.

Don't try to read it; look for the Xi'an Stele of 781, inscribed in Chinese and Syriac, which records the Church of the East in Tang China (a Danish visitor tried to take it abroad in 1907, and it ended up here instead), and the stone reliefs of horses made for Emperor Taizong's tomb. Four of the Six Steeds are in this museum, and the other two are in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

A few minutes' walk from the museum, Shuyuanmen is a short lane of old-style buildings selling brushes, ink, inkstones, paper and scrolls. After the stones, it's the place to try the craft yourself: some shops let you have a go with a brush, and watching a calligrapher draw a character in one stroke explains the museum better than any label.

Buy the basics, not the antique-looking pieces: a brush, an ink block and practice paper make a better souvenir than a scroll you can't date.

Ride Line 2 to Nanshaomen. The Little Wild Goose Pagoda is the Big Wild Goose Pagoda's slimmer, younger sibling, built between 707 and 709 in the Jianfu Temple. It had fifteen storeys until the 1556 earthquake knocked two off, leaving 13 and about 43 meters, and its dense, narrow eaves look more delicate than the heavy Big Goose.

It stands in the grounds of the Xi'an Museum, which holds over 110,000 objects, only a couple of thousand on display. It needs a booking on WeChat or another app and is closed on Tuesdays. It's quieter than the Shaanxi History Museum, and that's the reason to come.

Take Line 2 north to the Daming Palace, the imperial residence of the Tang emperors for more than 220 years. Emperor Taizong began building it in 634 for his retired father, and Empress Wu had it redesigned from 660. Today it's a huge, flat park, with the footprints of halls marked out in earth and brick, a model of the whole complex and a restored gate.

It's the one site where the lesson is what isn't there: the center of an empire, now an open field. Walk the main axis toward the ruins of the great audience hall and you get the scale of Tang power without a single standing wall.

Your last night. Defu Lane (Defuxiang) is the old bar street just inside the South Gate, a short lane of live-music bars and restaurants. Eat lamb skewers (chuan'r), dusted with cumin and chili, and try what Xi'an drinks: a small glass of Xifengjiu, the local baijiu spirit, or a cold Hans, the local lager.

Baijiu is a strong grain spirit, so treat the first glass as a tasting: a small sip, then see. If you have the energy, walk along the foot of the wall for a last look at the lit gate towers, and end where you began.