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This is where it all began, or ended. For much of the active life of the Silk Routes Xi’an was the funnel for intelligence, money, people and goods arriving from and leaving for what the Chinese called the “Western Regions”.  At times it was the world’s largest, richest and most cosmopolitan city, and capital of its largest, richest and most powerful nation.  Although later partially rebuilt by the Ming, Xi’an lost its capital status for good at the end of the Tang dynasty.  The American archaeologist Langdon Warner, passing through in 1923, was disappointed.  

    The 1974 discovery of the Gin Terracotta Warriors, the opening of China’s doors to foreign tourism, and the partial deregulation of the economy changed everything.  The warriors were kept secret until they were ready for display, but after that tourists rushed to visit them in numbers rivaling those at the main sights of Beijing.  Meanwhile China’s economic boom brought both a forest of shiny new towers and the severe pollution caused by industry, motor vehicles and increasing population that almost hid them from view. The city has re­-expanded to cover almost the same area as at its Suí and Táng peak, although the Silk Route is mentioned only to attract tourists. A monument of stone camels has been built near where the Táng city’s west gate once stood, and is officially designated the Routes’ starting point.

     There is enough to see in and around Xi’an to keep even the most active visitor busy for a week or two. In addition to the official sights, it’s easy to discover buildings of considerable antiquity just by wandering around the back alleys, even if they’ve been changed in use or covered with a patina of modern additions. At the end of the sign writing market, you can find the entrance to a library from the time of the Emperor Qiánlóng (1711—99) and now home to many families. Other back streets have temples functioning as schools or workshops, their high, slooping roofs easily visible but their entrances hard to find. The northwest quarter within the Ming walls is still home to large numbers of Huí, their way of life giving a foretaste of the cultures of Níngxià and much of Gansù to the west. 

     No city on the Imperial Highway is more visited than Xi’an, and this brings its own problems. Emerging from the passage under the Drum Tower you may be accosted by pretty girls with excellent English who say they are art students raising funds for a visit to Germany won’t you please come and see their ‘unique’ paintings which you’ll later see in every gift shop and at every tourist site. The ‘students’ have been just about to go to Germany for at least five years, and still are.   

                  City Wall of Xi'an                               Tower and City Walls                                      Pottery at Banpo

 History

    Traces of activity from as early as 800,000 years ago have been found in this area, the land within the Yellow River’s great northern loop being traditionally the cradle of the Chinese race. The earliest known examples of Chinese writing were unearthed nearby at Bànpo on pottery wares from Neolithic times, carbon-dated as belonging to the Yangsháo culture, between 5000 and 3000 BC. 

     Previous versions of Xi’an have been capitals for far longer than Beijing and home to kings and emperors under the Western Zhou, Qin, Western Hàn, Xin, Suí, Táng, and a host of inter­mediate smaller dynasties. Cháng’an (eternal peace), the version built under the earlier (Western) Hàn to the northwest of modern Xi’an, was China’s first metropolis. With an area of around 35 sq km, it was probably equaled only by Rome in size. The remains of its walls and the bases of its palaces can still be seen, although the land in between has long been ploughed. At the time of Emperor Wudi (reigned 141—87 BC), when Zhang Qian went on missions to the Western Regions, the city may have contained as many as 200,000 people—including representatives of foreign powers contacted by Zhang and his successors, and students from all over China.

     The Eastern (Later) Hàn chose Luòyáng as their capital but their eventual successors, the Suí, built a new capital slightly southeast of Cháng’an on the site of modern Xi’an. The first Suí emperor moved into the incomplete city, now named City of Great Prosperity in AD 583, six years before the unification was completed. Surrounded by walls of rammed earth nearly 10km by 9km and probably more than l0m high, the city was divided into three areas: the palace, the administrative quarter and the residential area. The latter occupied nearly 90 per cent of the city, and was divided into 108 individually walled compounds of hovels, mansions and temples. City of Great Prosperity was then the largest city in the world, and the largest in the whole of Chinese imperial history. At times earlier courts had been forced to roam, as the land around Xi’an was not fertile enough to sustain them, but the Suí solved this by building the Grand Canal system connecting their capitals and the food-poor northern border with the lush rice paddies to the south. The result was almost 2000km of canals 40 paces wide. Other vast earthworks included the construction and repair of a long section of the Great Wall in northern Shanxi, said to have involved more than a million laborers.

     Civil war and failed attacks on Korea brought down the Suí, City of Great Prosperity falling to a rebel who was to become the first Táng emperor in AD 617. The city was renamed Cháng’an to suggest continuity with the Hàn dynasty and to support the legitimacy of the new one. If under the Suí the city became the largest in the world, under the Táng it became the most cosmopolitan. Persians, Arabs, Jews, Uighurs and other Central Asian traders who arrived by land along the Silk Routes and later by sea were allowed to establish communities in Cháng’an. They brought their own cultures, technologies, and religions, including Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judaism. Profoundly influencing Táng art, cuisine and fashions, they were treated with a liberality unique in Chinese history, and allowed to live by their own laws in communities ruled by their own headmen.

     Although re-established, the Táng never really recovered from the weakness caused by the rebellion, which captured Cháng’an in AD 756.  Militarily exhausted, they were unable to resist a rebellion by the Uighurs and the Tibetan occupation of Gansù, which cut the land routes to the west. Cháng’an was captured again by a confedera­tion of bandit gangs in AD 860 and, although the emperor returned to the city in 883, it had suffered severe destruction. The dynasty finally expired in 907, and with it Cháng’an’s days as the capital of a unified China. The city walls currently visible, impressive as they are, were erected by the Ming (1368—1644) on roughly the site of the Táng palace only. The next lengthy imperial stay was not until late 1900, when the Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxù fled to Xi’an to avoid the foreign armies that had come to relieve the Beijing legation quarter besieged, with tilling complicity, by the Boxer rebels.

     Occupation by imperial dynasties over the centuries has left the plain around Xi’an riddled with the tombs of emperors, their families, and privileged ministers. Grave robbing has always flourished, right up to modern times. Archaeologists’ finds, impressive though they frequently are, are others’ leftovers. In 1994 the Xi’an police set up a special bureau to counter the black market in cultural relics, the first such organization in China. In 1995 it nevertheless invest gated no fewer than 278 cases of tomb robbing, nabbing 705 suspects, several cars, mobile phones and guns, and retrieving more than 5000 relics.