Xi’an and the Silk Road: Reading the Eastern Terminus through Museums, Markets and Faith

Most cities on the Silk Road tell you what passed through them. Xi’an, often written Xian, tells you what stayed. A Buddhist pagoda built for scriptures carried back from India, a stone tablet recording the arrival of Christian monks from the west, a mosque laid out like a Chinese temple, and a lane of Hui Muslim food stalls are all still within a short drive of one another, and together they make the Xi’an Silk Road story legible in a way no map can. This article reads the eastern terminus through those places: its museums, its markets and its houses of faith. They are also the first stops on our history-led Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent, and the three days in the city that open our small group Silk Road tour through China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

The Xi’an Silk Road connection: why the city is the eastern terminus

Xi’an stands on the site of Chang’an, the capital of the Western Han and, centuries later, of the Sui and Tang. It was from the Han court here that Emperor Wu sent the envoy Zhang Qian west in about 138 BC, and it was to Tang Chang’an that merchants, monks and envoys from Central Asia, Persia and beyond were travelling at the height of the road’s traffic. The city’s long run as a capital, its grid plan and its cosmopolitan Tang population are told in our guide to Xi’an as the beginning of the Silk Road, and the network as a whole in our article on the history and legacy of the Silk Road. This piece takes a different route through the same city.

The idea is simple. The Silk Road was never only a trade in silk. It moved religions, scripts, recipes, crafts and people, and in Xi’an you can see several of those exchanges side by side, in buildings and objects that survive. UNESCO recognised this in 2014, when it inscribed the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor, a 5,000-kilometre section of the network shared by China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Five of its thirty-three components are in Xi’an itself: the sites of the Han Weiyang Palace and the Tang Daming Palace, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, the Small Wild Goose Pagoda and the Xingjiao Temple. Read together with the museums and the Muslim Quarter, they show the eastern terminus as a place where the road’s cargo arrived and took root.

The Terracotta Army: the empire before the road

The obvious place to begin is also the earliest. The army of terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, was buried in the late 3rd century BC, before the Han opened the western route. Workers drilling a well found the first figures in 1974, and the pits, with their ranks of soldiers, horses and bronze chariots, are the centrepiece of Day 2 of the tour. The story of the emperor, the excavations and the theories about who made the figures is told in our article on the Terracotta Warriors and the latest discoveries, so it is not repeated here.

For a reader of the Silk Road, the army matters as a starting line. It shows the scale of the state that would later push its frontier west: a centralised empire able to organise labour, standardise production and project power. The Han inherited that machinery and turned it outward along the Hexi Corridor. The same day, the tour visits the Neolithic village site at Banpo, which the tour page describes as a settlement of the Yangshao Culture, which flourished in the Yellow River Valley between 5000 and 3000 BC. Between them, Banpo and the Qin pits remind you how deep the roots of this region run before any caravan left it.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda: Buddhism comes home along the road

The first great import you meet in the city is a religion. Buddhism had reached China from India and Central Asia by the Han, carried by merchants and missionaries along the same routes as trade goods. By the 7th century, Chinese monks were travelling the other way in search of better texts. Among them was Xuanzang, who left Chang’an in about 629, travelled west by way of the oasis kingdoms of Central Asia, studied in India, and returned to the capital in 645 after roughly sixteen years away, bringing hundreds of Sanskrit scriptures with him.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was built in 652, at the Da Ci’en Temple, to house those texts, and Xuanzang oversaw its construction. The first pagoda had five storeys; it was rebuilt with seven under Empress Wu Zetian, and the brick casing you see is largely the work of Ming-dynasty restorers. The tour page singles out its square floors, rather than round ones, as a mark of Tang style. It stands today at about 64 metres, and it is one of the Xi’an components of the UNESCO Silk Roads listing.

Xuanzang spent the rest of his life translating in Chang’an and died in 664. His remains were later reinterred at the Xingjiao Temple south of the city, where his five-storey relic pagoda from the Tang still stands, another of the UNESCO components. Standing below the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, you are looking at the end point of a journey that ran through the same oases the tour follows west. The cave temples at Dunhuang, which our article on the Mogao Caves and their Buddhist art explores, are the same faith seen from the middle of the road.

The Forest of Stone Steles: the Silk Road in writing

If the pagoda is about faith, the Forest of Stone Steles Museum is about the written word, and it holds a direct piece of evidence for the Silk Road’s religious traffic. The museum occupies a former Confucian temple and has gathered inscribed stone tablets since 1087, under the Northern Song. Its core is the Kaicheng Stone Classics, carved between 833 and 837 under the Tang: 114 tablets, engraved on both sides with more than 650,000 characters, setting out twelve Confucian classics in an authorised text. Around them stand centuries of memorials, poems, maps and works of calligraphy, which is why the museum is a place of pilgrimage for students of Chinese script.

The Silk Road stele among them was set up in 781. Known in English as the Nestorian Stele, or the Xi’an Stele, it records in Chinese, with Syriac on its sides, the arrival in 635 of Christian monks of the Church of the East and the welcome they received from the Tang emperor Taizong. It was unearthed in the 1620s, and in 1907 it was moved into the museum after local officials learned that the Danish adventurer Frits Holm was trying to obtain it. It is a remarkable document to read in a Confucian setting: a church of Syriac-speaking Christians from the west, written up in the language and forms of the Tang court, at the eastern end of the road.

Do you need to read Chinese to get something from the Forest of Steles?

No. The tour page notes that there are English-speaking national guides throughout the China leg, and the stories the steles tell, from the Confucian classics to the Nestorian Stele, come through clearly with a guide to explain them. What you see for yourself is the craft: the variety of calligraphic styles cut in stone, the carved tortoise bases and the sheer density of text.

The Great Mosque and the Muslim Quarter: a Silk Road community that stayed

The third faith in the city came with traders, and the community they founded is still there. The tour page traces the Muslim enclave inside the city to the Tang dynasty, when Muslim merchants came along the Silk Road and stayed. Their descendants, the Hui, are Chinese-speaking Muslims, and the neighbourhood around the Drum Tower is still their quarter.

Its heart is the Great Mosque on Huajue Lane. Tradition dates its founding to the Tang, around 742, but the evidence for that date is thin, and the buildings you walk through today were largely constructed under the Ming in the late 14th century. What makes the mosque worth reading closely is its form. There are no domes and no slender minarets. Instead, a series of courtyards runs from east to west, with timber gateways, tiled roofs and carved stone tablets, toward a prayer hall facing Mecca, and an octagonal, pagoda-like tower, the Shengxin Lou, may once have served as its minaret. It is a mosque built in the architectural language of a Chinese temple, which is exactly what you would expect from a faith that arrived along a trade route and settled for good.

Markets: from the Tang West Market to the lanes of the Muslim Quarter

Tang Chang’an traded through two official markets. The East Market served mainly domestic trade; the West Market was the city’s international market, where goods from the western routes changed hands. Excavated remains of the West Market, including a well, a drain and cart tracks, are preserved on the ground floor of the Tang West Market Museum on the site. The tour does not visit it, but it is a useful image to carry with you: the terminus of the Silk Road was, quite literally, a marketplace.

The market you will walk through is the Muslim Quarter. Its lanes are busy with stalls and small restaurants selling Hui food that carries the road’s influence in its ingredients: mutton rather than pork, flatbreads, and lamb skewers spiced with cumin. A bowl of mutton broth with torn flatbread is a Xi’an classic. The quarter is not a museum, and that is its value. Here the Silk Road’s legacy is a working neighbourhood, with a mosque at its centre and a market around it, much as the old caravan cities were organised.

The Drum Tower, the city wall and the provincial museum

The rest of Day 3 frames these places within the later city. Xi’an’s brick city wall, 13.7 kilometres long, was built between 1370 and 1378 under the first Ming emperor, Hongwu, and it still encloses the old centre. The group walks on the wall, then follows a walking route that ends at the Forest of Stone Steles. The Drum Tower, built in 1380 at the edge of the Muslim Quarter, is the partner of the Bell Tower a short walk away, and the tour page notes that a huge drum is beaten at sunset to signal the end of the day.

The day ends at the provincial museum and its displays of China’s ancient civilisation. Xi’an’s museum collections are where the Silk Road becomes tangible in objects. One example is the Hejiacun hoard, found in October 1970 by construction workers and now shown at the Shaanxi History Museum. Probably buried during one of the political crises of the 8th century (long linked to the An Lushan rebellion, though some scholars argue for 783), it held more than a thousand pieces of Tang gold, silver, agate, jade and glass, among them a Persian silver coin and a Byzantine gold coin, an agate drinking horn carved as an antelope’s head, and a gilded silver cup decorated with Sogdian musicians. It makes the reach of Tang Chang’an plain: wealth, taste and coinage from across Asia, buried in two pottery jars and a silver jar.

How much walking is involved in Xi’an?

Plan for plenty of walking, especially on Day 3, the full-day city tour. The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate, which the tour page defines as being able to carry your own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. In Xi’an that means a walk on top of the city wall, a walk through the old streets to the Forest of Stone Steles, and time on foot around the Terracotta Army pits, the pagoda and the Muslim Quarter.

How long does the tour spend in Xi’an?

Three days, with the departure on the morning of Day 4. On Day 1 you make your own way to the hotel, with an introductory meeting in the late afternoon and a welcome dinner. Day 2 covers the Terracotta Warriors and Banpo, followed by a dumpling banquet with the Tang Dynasty Show, and Day 3 is the full city day described above. On Day 4 the group takes a high-speed train west to Lanzhou.

What the eastern terminus prepares you for

Read in this order, Xi’an gives you a set of questions to carry west. Where did the Buddhism of the pagoda come from, and how did it travel? Where were the Christians of the stele coming from? How did a Muslim community end up in a Chinese capital, and what did the road look like between here and the places those faiths began? The rest of the route answers them. Our guide to the Silk Road through China, from Xi’an through Gansu and Xinjiang follows the corridor stop by stop. At the western end of the Ming wall, the fortress of the Jiayu Pass on the Great Wall shows where a later dynasty drew its frontier, and at Dunhuang the cave temples show what the oasis made of the faith that Xuanzang went west to find.

Is Xi’an a good place to start for solo travellers?

Yes. The tour page describes the journey as designed for couples and solo travellers, and an Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group throughout. Beginning with an introductory meeting and a welcome dinner on the first evening means you meet the people you will be travelling with before the sightseeing starts.

Xi’an is a fitting overture to the Silk Road because it shows the road’s results before you see the road itself. Travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you spend three days in the old capital, reading its museums, markets and places of worship, before setting out along the route that brought those things here.