Xi’an: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Xi’an was Chang’an, and Chang’an was the capital of thirteen dynasties over roughly eleven hundred years. Under the Tang, from 618 to 907, it was the largest city in the world and the eastern end of the Silk Road: about eighty-four square kilometres inside its walls — seven times the area you can walk round today — laid out as a grid of a hundred and eight walled wards that were locked at curfew, with a population somewhere over a million and resident Persian, Sogdian, Jewish, Nestorian Christian and Zoroastrian communities. Almost none of that city survives above ground. What you walk round instead is the Ming wall of 1370, which enclosed only the former administrative core, and it is the most complete city wall in China. Two and a half hours on the flat. The wall circuit by bicycle is a separate ninety minutes and worth doing at either end of the day.

A short history of Xi’an

Xi'an, formerly called Chang'an, was the capital of more than ten Chinese dynasties. In 221 BC Qin Shi Huang unified China and established his capital in the area, and near it the Terracotta Army was buried with him; it was discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well. Under the Tang dynasty, from the 7th to the 9th century, Chang'an was one of the largest cities in the world and the starting point of the Silk Road. The wall that surrounds the old city was built under the Ming dynasty, in the 14th century, and it is one of the most complete to survive in China. The Muslim Quarter is home to the descendants of merchants who came along the Silk Road.

The ten best sights in Xi’an

1
The City Wall
13.74 kilometres round, 12 metres high, built 1370–78; the most complete city wall in China. 54 yuan. Verified 10/2026
2
Yongning Gate — the South Gate
The main gate and the one with the full barbican; the bicycles for the circuit are hired here
3
Hanguang Gate
A Tang gate found under the wall during roadworks in 1986 and left exposed in a museum under it
4
Wenchang Gate
The gate beside the Stele Forest; the Kuixing tower on it was for the god of examinations
5
Zhuque Gate
Named for the vermilion bird of the south; the Tang avenue of the same name ran from it for ten kilometres
6
Anding Gate
The west gate, and the one the Silk Road caravans actually left through
7
The Bell Tower
1384, and in 1582 the whole wooden tower was physically moved a thousand metres to its present spot
8
The Drum Tower
1380, and the gate under it is the entrance to the Muslim Quarter; drum performances on the hour
9
The Great Mosque
Founded in 742 under the Tang, and built entirely in Chinese style — no dome and no minaret
10
Forest of Stone Steles
Founded 1087; over three thousand steles, and the Nestorian Stele of 781 is the one to find

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Inside the wall

The South Gate · Yongningmen is the main gate and the only one with its full defensive sequence intact: an outer archery tower, a walled barbican between, and the gate tower itself, so an attacker who broke the first gate was trapped in a courtyard overlooked from three sides. The wall here is twelve metres high and between fifteen and eighteen metres thick at the base — thick enough that the top is a road, which is why you can cycle the whole 13.74-kilometre circuit. Bicycles are hired at this gate and a full lap takes about a hundred minutes.
Forest of Stone Steles · Founded in 1087 to house the Confucian classics carved on 114 stone slabs in 837 as the authoritative master copy — because a printed text could be wrong and a carved one could be checked. There are now over three thousand steles. The one to find is in the second hall: the Nestorian Stele, carved in 781, which records in Chinese and Syriac the arrival of a Syriac Christian mission in Chang’an in 635 and the names of seventy of its clergy. It was buried, found again in 1625, and it is the single most important document of early Christianity in Asia.
The Bell Tower · Built in 1384 at the geometric centre of the Ming city, where the four main streets meet, and then in 1582 the entire wooden tower was taken apart, moved a thousand metres east and rebuilt — because the city centre had shifted when the walls were extended and the tower was no longer in the middle. The bell it was built for is now in the Stele Forest museum; the one in the tower is a replica cast in 1996.
The Drum Tower · 1380, four years older than the Bell Tower, and the pair worked as a clock: the drum was struck at dusk to close the gates and the bell at dawn to open them, which is the origin of the phrase morning bell and evening drum. The gate passage underneath the tower is the entrance to the Muslim Quarter, and that is not a coincidence — the Hui community settled around the administrative centre because that is where the trade was.
The Great Mosque · Founded in 742, in the Tang, and one of the oldest mosques in China — and it looks nothing like a mosque: four courtyards in sequence, ceremonial arches, a pavilion where a minaret would be, upturned tiled roofs, and inscriptions in Arabic on Chinese stone steles. The prayer hall faces west to Mecca while everything else obeys Chinese axial planning. It is a working mosque for the Hui community around it and the courtyards are open to visitors between prayers.
Shuyuanmen · The calligraphy street, running west from the south gate along the inside of the wall, and the shops on it sell brushes, ink stones, paper and seals to people who use them. At the far end is the Guanzhong Academy, a Ming Confucian school founded in 1609 that is still a school. The street was restored in the nineties and the restoration is heavy-handed, but the trade in it is real and the prices are a fraction of a tourist shop.

Lintong: the emperor and the bathhouse

Thirty kilometres east of the city, two sites a few minutes apart carry the beginning and one of the hinges of Chinese history. In 221 BC Qin Shi Huang unified the warring states into one empire, standardised the script, the weights, the coinage and even the axle width of carts, and set about building himself a tomb that took something like 700,000 conscripted workers thirty-eight years. In December 1936, in a hot-spring villa two kilometres from that tomb, Chiang Kai-shek was arrested by his own general and forced into an alliance with the Communists against Japan — a decision that shaped the rest of the century. Half a day minimum, and the warriors need two hours on their own. Go early: the site takes tens of thousands of people a day and the queues at Pit 1 are the whole problem.

Pit One · On 29 March 1974 a group of farmers from Xiyang village were digging a well in a drought and hit a terracotta head. Pit 1 turned out to be 230 metres by 62 and to contain something over six thousand figures in battle order; the current estimate for all three pits is above eight thousand. Every face is different, which is usually explained as assembly from interchangeable moulded parts with individually modelled features. They were all painted in bright mineral colours, and the paint flakes off within minutes of exposure to dry air — which is why most of the pit is deliberately left unexcavated.
Pits Two and Three · Smaller and far less crowded, and the ones worth the time. Pit 2 holds the cavalry, the kneeling archers and the chariots, and a handful of figures have been lifted out and put in glass cases where you can see the face and the armour from thirty centimetres. Pit 3 is read as the command post — fewer figures, higher rank, and no battle formation. Most visitors do Pit 1 and leave; doing it in reverse order is the single best piece of advice about this site.
The mausoleum mound · A kilometre and a half from the pits is a hill about seventy-six metres high, and it is the tomb itself — and it has never been opened. That is a deliberate policy rather than a lack of means: China stopped excavating imperial tombs after the Dingling disaster of the 1950s. Sima Qian, writing a century after the emperor died, described a tomb containing a map of the empire with rivers of flowing mercury and a ceiling of stars, protected by crossbows set to fire automatically. Soil surveys of the mound find mercury concentrations far above the surrounding ground.
Huaqing Palace · Hot springs used by emperors since the eighth century BC and laid out as a palace by the Tang emperor Xuanzong for his consort Yang Guifei, whose story — the emperor neglecting the empire for her, the rebellion, her forced death at a post station — is the most retold love story in Chinese literature. The excavated Tang bathing pools are here, including a lotus-shaped one for the emperor and a smaller one for her. The Tang poem about it, Bai Juyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrow, is memorised by schoolchildren.
The Xi’an Incident · On 12 December 1936 Chiang Kai-shek, then leader of China, was staying in a villa in this compound. His own subordinate, the Manchurian general Zhang Xueliang, had been ordered to fight the Communists and wanted to fight the Japanese instead; his troops stormed the villa before dawn, Chiang escaped out of a window and was caught halfway up the hill behind it in his nightshirt. He was held for two weeks and released only after agreeing to a united front with the Communists against Japan. The bullet holes in the window frames are preserved and the spot on the hill is marked.
Banpo · On the way back into the city, and it reframes everything: a Neolithic village of around 4500 BC, excavated between 1954 and 1957, with the postholes of forty-five houses, a communal hall, kilns, a cemetery and painted pottery with human-faced fish designs. It was the first archaeological site museum built in China and it is where Chinese archaeology as a discipline effectively began. The emperor’s tomb is 4,300 years younger than this.

The Tang city south of the wall

The Tang capital was seven times the size of the walled city and most of it lay south of where the Ming wall now runs, in what is today a district of broad avenues and new towers. Two pagodas are the only major Tang buildings still standing, and they are both there, and between them they hold the two things Chang’an was for: the Buddhist translation effort that brought the Indian canon into Chinese, and the examination culture that staffed the empire. Add the provincial museum, which has the best Tang collection anywhere, and this is the half-day that explains why the city matters. Three hours with the museum, and the museum is free but requires booking.

Big Wild Goose Pagoda · Built in 652 for one man and one project. The monk Xuanzang left Chang’an illegally in 629, walked to India through Central Asia, spent seventeen years there, and came back in 645 with 657 Sanskrit manuscripts and an imperial welcome. He spent the rest of his life in this temple translating them, with a team of assistants, and produced seventy-five works that are still the standard Chinese versions. The pagoda was built to hold the manuscripts. It leans slightly, and the novel Journey to the West is a sixteenth-century fantasy loosely based on his trip.
Small Wild Goose Pagoda · Built 707 to 709 and originally fifteen storeys; it is now thirteen, because the top two came down in the Shaanxi earthquake of 23 January 1556 — an event with an estimated death toll of around 830,000, the deadliest earthquake in recorded human history, caused largely by the collapse of loess cave dwellings across the province. The pagoda cracked from top to bottom in later quakes and closed up again on its own three times, which local records treat as a minor miracle and geologists attribute to the foundation.
Xi’an Museum · In the grounds of the Small Wild Goose Pagoda, free, and almost nobody goes into it — which makes it the best hour in the city. The ground floor holds a scale model of Tang Chang’an that is the only way to grasp the size: the Ming wall you walked round yesterday is a small rectangle in one corner of it. Upstairs are the Tang tomb ceramics, including the glazed figures of Central Asian camel drivers that are the physical evidence of what the Silk Road actually brought into the city.
Shaanxi History Museum · Free, and one of the four great museums in China, because the province held the capital for most of the imperial period and the ground is full. The room that justifies the visit is the Hejiacun hoard: a Tang nobleman’s buried treasure found by accident in 1970 in two pottery jars, over a thousand pieces of gold, silver and glass, including an agate cup in the shape of a horned beast’s head that is Central Asian work and a silver jug with a dancing horse on it. The separate gallery of Tang tomb murals costs a further 270 yuan, which is a lot and worth knowing before you queue for it.
Datang Everbright City · A kilometre and a half of Tang-styled buildings, lit to a plan, with costumed performers and a sound system, built in the 2010s on the axis running south from the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. It is entirely a construction and it is also one of the most visited places in China — the point to understand is that this is not aimed at foreigners at all: it is domestic heritage tourism at enormous scale, and watching ten thousand Chinese visitors in rented Tang dress photograph each other is itself the more interesting thing to see.
Qinglong Temple · A small, quiet temple in the south-east of the Tang city, and the reason it matters is Japanese. In 804 the monk Kūkai arrived in Chang’an from Japan, studied esoteric Buddhism here under the master Huiguo for two years, and took the whole tradition home — where it became Shingon, one of the major schools of Japanese Buddhism, still practised by millions. Japanese donors funded the memorial hall and the cherry garden here in the 1980s, and in April it is full of Japanese pilgrims and local families looking at the blossom.

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Getting to Xi’an and getting around

Xianyang International Airport · Twenty-six kilometres north-west; the metro now reaches it and the bus is still cheaper
Xi’an North Railway Station · Beijing in four and a half hours at 350 km/h; thirty-four platforms and bring your passport
Xi’an Railway Station · The old station right outside the north-east wall; the slow trains and the bus to the warriors
Bell Tower Station · Lines 2 and 6 under the exact centre of the walled city; the metro opened in 2011
Huashan Railway Station · Thirty-five minutes by bullet train and the stop for Mount Hua; a shuttle from the platform

Cheap eats in Xi’an

Xi’an has the best street food in China and the reason is historical: this was the end of the Silk Road, and the Hui — Chinese-speaking Muslims descended from Arab and Persian traders who settled here from the Tang onwards — have been cooking in the same few lanes for twelve hundred years. The cuisine is wheat rather than rice, lamb rather than pork, cumin and chilli rather than soy, and almost everything is eaten standing up or on a stool. Ten to thirty yuan a dish, one and a half to four dollars. One rule: the famous lane behind the Drum Tower is where visitors eat, and the lanes one block west of it are where the quarter eats.

Yangrou paomo · Lamb soup with flatbread you tear up yourself; three dollars, and how you tear it decides the dish
Roujiamo · Chopped meat in a flat baked bun; a dollar and a half, and the bread is older than the empire
Biang biang mian · One belt-wide hand-pulled noodle under chilli oil; two dollars, and the name is written in 58 strokes
Liangpi · Cold wheat-starch noodles with vinegar, chilli and sesame; a dollar and a half, and it is the summer dish
Guantang baozi · Steamed lamb dumplings in bamboo baskets; the Hui answer to the Shanghai soup dumpling. Three dollars
Hulutou · Pork intestine soup with bread, and the dish the city eats when it is cold; two dollars
Persimmon cakes · Fried persimmon dough with walnut filling; a dollar for two, and autumn is the season
Yangrou chuan · Cumin lamb over charcoal; cents a skewer, and the lane the locals use rather than the famous one
Yongxingfang · A built food court of Shaanxi provincial dishes; artificial, well done, and the local alternative
Sour soup dumplings and vinegar · Shaanxi vinegar is its own category; the city puts it in everything and sells it by the litre

Museums in Xi’an

There is more buried in this province than anywhere else in China and the museums reflect it: Shaanxi held the imperial capital for most of the imperial period, and the provincial museum is one of the four great collections in the country. The practical facts are the same everywhere in China now — the state museums are free, several require booking against a passport number, and all of them scan bags at the door. Two of the best are almost empty: the Xi’an Museum and the Han Yangling mausoleum.

Shaanxi History Museum · Free; the slot opens on WeChat at 17:00 five days ahead and goes in minutes. Closed Mondays, and the Tang murals hall is a separate 270 yuan
Xi’an Museum · Free, almost empty, and the model of Tang Chang’an on the ground floor is the single most useful exhibit in the city
Terracotta Army museum · Do Pit 3, then Pit 2, then Pit 1 — the reverse of what everyone does, and it works
Han Yangling Mausoleum · The best-presented tomb museum in China and almost nobody goes; you walk on glass over open pits
Forest of Stone Steles · Three thousand steles and the Nestorian Stele of 781; an hour and a half, and buy a rubbing
Banpo Museum · The 4500 BC village, and the first archaeological site museum built in China
Tang West Market Museum · Private, on the dig of the Tang western market itself; the Silk Road material is the reason

Holy places in Xi’an

For about three centuries Chang’an was the most religiously mixed city on earth. Buddhism arrived here from India and was translated into Chinese here; Nestorian Christianity arrived in 635 and a stele records it; Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and Muslims all had communities, and Daoism had its state temples. The Tang court tolerated all of it until 845, when the emperor Wuzong suppressed Buddhism and confiscated the monasteries — and most of the great Tang temples date their destruction to that year. What survives is a handful of temples and two pagodas, and the Hui quarter, which never went away.

The Great Mosque · 742, entirely Chinese in form; four courtyards, a pavilion instead of a minaret, and it is in use
Big Wild Goose Pagoda · 652, built to hold the 657 manuscripts Xuanzang brought back from India on foot
The Nestorian Stele · In the Stele Forest; carved in 781 and the most important document of early Christianity in Asia
Xingjiao Temple · Xuanzang’s remains are in the pagoda here; a UNESCO Silk Road site and a working monastery
Xiangji Temple · The founding temple of Pure Land Buddhism; Japanese pilgrims come to it and local visitors do not
Qinglong Temple · Where Kūkai studied in 804 and took Shingon Buddhism to Japan; cherry blossom in April
Wolong Temple · A working Chan monastery inside the walls; no ticket, no tour groups, and monks chanting at five
Caotang Temple · Where Kumarajiva translated the sutras around 400 AD, thirty-three kilometres out and empty

Nature and day trips near Xi’an

Xi’an sits in the Wei river valley with the Loess Plateau to the north and the Qinling mountains to the south, and that line of mountains is the single most important geographical boundary in China: it divides the wheat-eating dry north from the rice-eating wet south, it stops the monsoon, and it is the watershed between the Yellow River and the Yangtze. It is also why the city is where it is — defensible from the south, fed by the river, and at the mouth of the corridor west into Central Asia. Everything green here is either the Qinling or a Tang lake refilled.

Mount Hua · 2,154 metres, a hundred and seven kilometres east; the plank walk is a genuine cliff path with a harness
The Qinling mountains · The range south of the city, and the climatic divide between north and south China
Cuihua Mountain · Thirty kilometres south; a lake dammed by an ancient landslide, and an ice cave that stays cold in August
Louguantai · Sixty kilometres south-west, and tradition puts the writing of the Dao De Jing on this spot
Qujiang Pool Park · The Tang pleasure lake, dry for a thousand years and refilled in 2008; free and large
Chanba wetland · The river confluence east of the city, cleaned and opened as a park; the only real wetland near Xi’an

Things to do in Xi’an with kids

Xi’an is easier with children than Beijing because it is smaller: the walled city is five kilometres across, the metro reaches most of it, and the single best thing to do here with a child is also the cheapest — cycling the top of the city wall. Two practical points apply across China now and will decide the trip: payment is by phone app and needs setting up before you fly, and most Western apps and websites are blocked. The free museums require booking against a passport number.

Cycling the city wall · 13.74 kilometres on top of a Ming wall; tandems too, and about a hundred minutes
Terracotta Army · Start at Pit 3 and work backwards; the glass cases in Pit 2 are what a child will actually look at
Han Yangling · You walk on a glass floor over the open pits; more interesting to a child than the warriors and far emptier
Qinling Wildlife Park · A drive-through park at the foot of the mountains; the Qinling pandas are a separate subspecies
Tang Paradise water show · A projection and fountain show on the lake after dark; loud, long and genuinely good
Xingqing Park · A Tang palace garden turned public park with pedal boats and no entry fee

Nightlife in Xi’an

Xi’an’s evening is mostly food and light rather than drink: the Muslim Quarter runs until midnight, the Tang-themed street south of the wall is lit until eleven and takes tens of thousands of domestic visitors a night, and the walls and both pagodas are floodlit. The actual bar scene is small and sits in two places — a restored lane by the south wall and the student district south of it. The metro closes around eleven and taxis after that need an app with a Chinese number or a hotel to call.

Datang Everbright City · A kilometre and a half lit to a plan, from seven; entirely domestic tourism and worth seeing for that
The Muslim Quarter at night · It runs to midnight and it is at its busiest at nine; no alcohol in the Hui lanes
Xiangzimiao Street · The bar lane by the south wall; live music in two or three rooms and the quietest option
The wall floodlit · The whole 13.74 kilometres is lit from dusk; the south gate from the outside is the view
Xiaozhai · The student district south of the wall; cheap beer, street food and the youngest crowd in the city
Sajinqiao at ten · The local late food street; skewers, beer on plastic tables and no English at all

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Frequently asked questions about Xi’an

What is there to see in Xi’an?

The top sights in Xi’an are The City Wall, Yongning Gate — the South Gate and Hanguang Gate. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Xi’an?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Xi’an without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Xi’an?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Xi’an, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Inside the wall.

How do you get to Xi’an and get around?

The main ways are Xianyang International Airport, Xi’an North Railway Station and Xi’an Railway Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Xi’an, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Xi’an that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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