Xi'an

Shaanxi, with two a's

The province is Shaanxi, and the doubled vowel is not a typing slip. Shaanxi and Shanxi are neighbouring provinces whose names differ in Mandarin only by tone, so the romanisation doubles the vowel in one of them to keep the two apart. The provincial government's own English-language name uses the doubled form. Older accounts render it "Shan'xi", which belongs to neither province.

Xi'an is its capital, with 13,167,600 residents at the end of 2024, up by 89,400 on the year before, spread over about 10,106 square kilometres in eleven districts and two counties. It became the capital of Shaanxi province in 1954, and a sub-provincial city in 1994.

That last date disposes of a claim that circulates widely: that Xi'an was a provincial capital for over a thousand years. It was not. The city has only borne the name Xi'an since 1369, when the Ming general Xu Da renamed it, and has been Shaanxi's capital only since 1954. Both halves of the claim fail, which is a pity, because the truth is more impressive than the error.

Thirteen dynasties, and what that figure counts

The standard Chinese formulation is that Xi'an was the capital of thirteen dynasties over 1,129 years: Western Zhou, Qin, Western Han, Xin, Eastern Han, Western Jin, Former Zhao, Former Qin, Later Qin, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, Sui and Tang. From the early Western Han until the late Tang the city was called Chang'an.

The figure is worth attributing rather than asserting, because it is a national convention rather than a neutral count. It includes short-lived regimes — Xin, Former Zhao, Former Qin, Later Qin — that a British reader would not naturally call dynasties. And two of the thirteen were not seated at Chang'an at all: the Western Zhou capital was Fenghao and the Qin capital was Xianyang, both in the Xi'an area but not in the later city. The convention is the one Chinese official sources use, and it is the figure a visitor will meet on every sign; it is simply not an archaeological fact.

One end of the Silk Road, not the end

Here the older accounts are right in substance and wrong in the article. UNESCO's inscription for the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an–Tianshan Corridor, added to the World Heritage List in 2014, names Chang'an and Luoyang together as the eastern terminus, describing Chang'an as the central capital of China under the Han and the Tang and the eastern anchor linking China to Central Asia. The corridor runs some 5,000 kilometres, within a network of around 8,700, to the Ili, Chuy and Talas valleys of Central Asia.

So Xi'an is an eastern starting point of the Silk Road, and calling it the starting point quietly writes Luoyang out. The property comprises 33 component sites in all, of which five lie in Xi'an: the sites of the Weiyang Palace of Western Han Chang'an and the Daming Palace of Tang Chang'an, the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, the Small Wild Goose Pagoda and the Xingjiaosi Pagodas.

The Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor

The mausoleum was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1987, under four criteria. Construction began in 246 BC and, on Sima Qian's account, labour continued until the emperor's death in 210 BC; the same source gives some 700,000 conscripts on the works. It lies at the northern foot of Lishan, about 35 kilometres north-east of Xi'an, and the designated property covers 56.25 square kilometres containing over 600 sites, including nearly two hundred accompanying pits. More than ten above-ground building sites and over five hundred underground pits and tombs have been identified, yielding upwards of fifty thousand pieces.

The grave mound stands 51.3 metres high. Older accounts give 250 feet, or 76 metres, which is wrong by half — and wrong in a telling way, since the imperial-to-metric conversion inside the claim is itself correct. That is the signature of a figure invented and then carefully converted.

Three pits, and which one is which

The three pits lie in a triangle and cover about 20,000 square metres between them. Pit 1 is the great one, at 14,260 square metres. Pit 2, found in 1976, covers 6,000 square metres and is estimated from trial excavation to hold more than 1,300 figures and horses. Pit 3, also found in 1976, is much the smallest at 520 square metres — an order of magnitude below the other two.

Older accounts garble this badly. A passage describing "the smallest of the three pits" at 64,500 square feet holding 1,400 figures is in fact a description of Pit 2, which is the middle one: 6,000 square metres converts to about 64,580 square feet, and the figure count matches. The genuinely smallest pit, at 520 square metres, is about 5,600 square feet. The same passage inflates Pit 1 to over 172,000 square feet, where 14,260 square metres is about 153,500 — too high by roughly a tenth.

On how many figures there are, the official bodies do not quite agree with each other, and the honest form says so. Around 2,000 life-size figures have actually been unearthed from the three pits, on the provincial government's figure. The national heritage administration describes the pits as holding over 7,000; other state accounts give about 8,000 warriors and horses, along with more than a hundred model chariots and over 40,000 bronze weapons. So: roughly two thousand excavated, of an estimated seven to eight thousand. The formation is read as three divisions and a command post — the garrison of the Qin capital at Xianyang. A separate small pit of civil officials, found in 2000, held twelve figures, horse skeletons, a wooden chariot and four bronze axes.

Two details that older accounts get right and deserve keeping: the figures were not cast from a single mould, and vary in height and face; and many carried real weapons of the period rather than models.

The chamber nobody has entered

This is the correction that matters most, because it is the one that would send a reader to Lishan expecting something that does not exist.

The main burial chamber has never been opened. A State Council notice of 1997 directs that large imperial tombs remain unexcavated until the scientific and technical conditions exist to protect what they contain, and archaeologists working on the site have said plainly that no mature technology or effective measure for protecting the relics exists — ruling out, for the present, both drilling and robotic entry. UNESCO notes that thousands of statues likely remain unearthed. Nothing has been restored, because nothing has been opened.

What is known about the inside comes from survey rather than excavation. Boreholes sunk across some 12,000 square metres in the 1980s found mercury concentrations of around 250 parts per billion above the chamber against about 30 outside, with spots reaching 1,500; a further survey in 2003 confirmed the pattern, and the quantity is estimated at at most around 100 tonnes. Remote sensing and geophysical work in 2002 and 2003 produced the first non-invasive outline of the underground palace.

Sima Qian's description is worth quoting accurately, because the embellished version has almost displaced it. He writes of some 700,000 conscripts; of replicas of palaces and offices and rare objects placed in the tomb; of mercury used to fashion the hundred rivers, the Yangtze, the Yellow River and the sea; and of representations of the heavenly bodies above with the features of the earth below. Horses covered in gems, and pearls arranged as constellations, appear in none of it. They are a later accretion, and they have been attached by older accounts not only to the wrong source but to the wrong place — to the warrior pits, which anyone can walk through, rather than to a sealed chamber nobody has seen.

The paint, and why it is not there

Older accounts say the colour on the figures "has now all worn off". That inverts the cause.

The figures were coated in East Asian lacquer and then painted with mineral pigments — malachite, azurite, vermilion, Han purple — bound with egg, in a palette of blue, green, red, violet, pink and white, with black and ochre less common. The paint does not flake from two millennia of wear underground. It flakes because the lacquer dries and shrinks as soon as a figure leaves the damp earth, taking the pigment layer with it. It is a problem of excavation, not of age. Consolidation treatments are used against it, traces survive, the best-preserved painted figures come from Pit 2, and the original colouring of 55 figures has been reconstructed.

Found by farmers, in 1974

The pits were found in 1974 by local farmers drilling a well. Older accounts say fishermen, which is a strange error for a site 35 kilometres inland. The month is not given by any official source, so the March often attached to the discovery should be treated as unconfirmed.

Booking the Terracotta Army

This is the practical item most likely to catch out a visitor arriving from Britain: there is no walk-up ticket.

Advance booking is compulsory, real-name and online only, through the site museum's own website or its official social accounts. It applies to everyone, including visitors from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, foreign visitors, and everyone entitled to free admission — those over 65, disabled visitors, and serving military and police. Person, ticket and identity document must match at the gate, and original documents must be carried. Arrival is expected thirty minutes before the booked slot, entry is through the North Gate only, and a ticket is valid for the same day. Ticket checking runs from 08:30 to 16:30 in the low season, from mid-November to mid-March, and to 17:00 from mid-March to mid-November. The museum operates by limited capacity and staggered entry but publishes no numeric daily cap.

The Forest of Stone Steles

The collection called the Xi'an Beilin Museum began in 1087, under the Northern Song, as a home for the Tang stone classics and for calligraphy; the steles were moved to the present site in 1103, and the museum proper was founded in 1944, making it the earliest in Shaanxi. It stands on Sanxue Street, inside Wenchang Gate of the city wall, laid out with a Confucian temple at the front, the stele forest at the centre, tomb carvings to the west and Buddhist statuary to the east.

Counts differ between good sources and should be given as a range: the collection runs to around eleven thousand items, of which the inscribed stones number roughly three thousand on the provincial government's account and more than four thousand on a scholarly one, spanning the Han to the Republic, with 134 items in nineteen groups classed as national treasures.

Three stones carry most of the weight. The Kaicheng Stone Classics, completed in 837 after seven years of carving, run to 114 blocks inscribed on 282 faces with over 650,000 characters. The Nestorian stele, erected in 781, records the arrival of Eastern Christianity in China. The Stele of Cao Quan, of 185 AD, is a canonical example of Eastern Han clerical script. Older accounts are right about all three dates.

Where they go wrong is on the script itself. Chinese writing is logographic, not pictographic — it was once thought to be ideographic, and about three quarters of characters are compounds of a semantic element with a phonetic one. The comparison with Egyptian hieroglyphs fails twice over, because hieroglyphs are themselves a mixed logographic and phonetic script rather than picture-writing. Nor is calligraphy five thousand years old: writing in China is attested from roughly the thirteenth to twelfth century BC, in the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, and calligraphy's recognition as an art is usually dated from the Han.

The museum reopened on 12 May 2025 after renovation and expansion, with a new north district alongside the old, more than two thousand items on display and reworked visitor routes. Anyone who has seen it before that date has seen a different museum.

The wall, the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower

The surviving city wall is Ming, built in the Hongwu era. The start year is given as 1374 on one provincial government page and 1370 on another, so it is best written as the 1370s, completed in 1378; the wall's history on the site is traced back to 582. It stands about 18 metres high, twelve to fourteen metres wide at the top and fifteen to eighteen at the base, and forms a closed rectangle with a perimeter of 13.74 kilometres enclosing an old town of some 11.32 square kilometres. There were four original gates — Changle to the east, Yongning south, Anding west and Anyuan north — and there are eighteen in all, with ascent possible at eight points.

It can be both walked and cycled, which is the single best thing to do in the city. A full circuit by bicycle takes about two hours at a moderate pace; on foot, rather longer. Bicycles are hired on the wall itself, with the longest hours at the South Gate.

Inside it, the Bell Tower of 1384 stands 36 metres high in brick and wood at the centre of the old town, with the Drum Tower, first built in 1380, about two hundred metres to its west.

The Wild Goose Pagoda, the Great Mosque and the Muslim quarter

The Great Wild Goose Pagoda was completed in AD 652 to house the sutras the monk Xuanzang brought back from India. It stands 64.517 metres high on a ground-floor base 25.5 metres to a side, and is the oldest and largest surviving Tang pagoda. It had five storeys originally, then nine, and has seven. It was placed under state protection as a key cultural relic in 1961 and became a component of the Silk Road World Heritage property in 2014.

The Great Mosque, on Huajue Lane north-west of the Drum Tower, has a stone tablet recording construction in 742, under the Tang, though most of the present buildings are Ming and Qing. It covers over 12,000 square metres in a long strip of four courtyards, and the detail that repays attention is its orientation: it faces west, towards Mecca, rather than south as a Chinese temple complex would. The prayer hall holds about a thousand worshippers and is closed to visitors. Its steles include work in the manner of Mi Fu and by Dong Qichang. Admission is free to Muslims.

The surrounding Muslim quarter lies north of West Street in Lianhu district, with Beiyuanmen running about five hundred metres north from the archway below the Drum Tower. It is home to over 20,000 Muslims and some ten mosques, and has no opening hours, being a district rather than an attraction. Its signature dishes are the mutton and bread soup called yangrou paomo, steamed buns and persimmon cakes.

The Shaanxi History Museum

Built in 1983 and opened in 1991, the museum holds some 370,000 items covering the period from prehistory to about 1840 across roughly 11,000 square metres of galleries. The holdings that justify a detour are the underground Tang mural hall, with around six hundred murals lifted from more than twenty noble tombs, the Hejia Village hoard of Tang gold and silver, and a 27-tonne stone coffin from the Jingling mausoleum.

It opens Tuesday to Sunday and closes on Mondays, except on national holidays. Admission to the permanent halls is free but ticketed and capped, and here the sources diverge sharply: older provincial pages give caps of four and six thousand a day, while the museum's own site gives 12,000 tickets daily, bookable up to five days ahead and valid only for the period reserved. The museum's figure is the one to work from. Its branch museum of Qin and Han civilisation, in the Xixian new district, closes on Tuesdays instead.

Getting there, and the date on the entry rules

Xi'an Xianyang International Airport opened Terminal 5 on 20 February 2025. At 705,500 square metres it is larger than the first three terminals combined, and it includes a museum of Shaanxi relics; a second northern runway came into use in December 2024, and on completion the airport will have four runways and four terminals, with the furthest gate capped at 600 metres from the centre.

High-speed trains use Xi'an North, which connects by metro Line 2 to the centre; the older Xi'an Railway Station, in the middle of the city, handles conventional and sleeper services. The Xi'an–Shiyan high-speed line opened at the end of June 2026, cutting Xi'an to Wuhan from about four and a half hours to two hours and 41 minutes, and the crossing of the Qinling mountains from over five hours to under two. A further line to Ankang was in testing, scheduled to open by the end of 2026. Metro Line 2 also serves the wall, at Yongningmen for the South Gate and Anyuanmen for the North.

On entry, one date governs everything. British citizens holding standard passports could enter mainland China visa-free for stays of up to thirty days until the end of December 2026, for tourism, business, visiting family or friends, and transit; paid work, study, journalism and longer stays need a visa arranged in advance. No extension beyond 2026 has been announced. A passport needs at least six months' validity from arrival and two blank pages, and place of residence must be registered with the local public security bureau within twenty-four hours, which hotels normally handle at check-in. One local point worth knowing: identity checks are made by police and printed copies of a passport are not accepted, so the original has to be carried.