西安的城墙 Xī'ān de chéngqiáng — Xi'an's Walls

Thirteen dynasties, and a wall that survived because the city stopped mattering

Xi'an — Chang'an under most of its imperial names — was the capital of China for longer than anywhere else. The usual count is thirteen dynasties over about eleven centuries, including the Zhou, the Qin from just outside it, the Han and the Tang. At its height in the eighth century, Tang Chang'an was laid out on a grid inside walls enclosing some eighty square kilometres, held perhaps a million people, and was plausibly the largest city on earth; the Japanese capitals at Nara and Kyoto were built on its plan, and Korean and Central Asian embassies, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians and Muslim merchants all had a presence in it. Lesson 94 follows the road they came in on. The wall you can walk on is not that city's. Tang Chang'an's defences were far larger and are gone; the surviving circuit is Ming, built in the 1370s on a reduced footprint, about fourteen kilometres round, twelve metres high and broad enough at the top to cycle on. What makes it remarkable is simply that it is still there. Nearly every Chinese city had walls, and nearly all were demolished in the twentieth century — Beijing's came down in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for the second ring road and the metro. Xi'an's survived partly through local resistance to demolition and partly, bluntly, because Xi'an was no longer important enough for the traffic pressure to win. The terracotta army is thirty kilometres east and belongs to a different period again: it was buried with the First Emperor of Qin, who died in 210 BC, and was found in 1974 by farmers digging a well. It is worth knowing that what you see is a fraction of the site, that the figures were originally painted and lost most of that colour on exposure, and that the tomb mound itself has deliberately not been excavated — the archaeological judgement being that current techniques would destroy more than they recovered. That decision is itself a good illustration of 考古 as a discipline rather than a treasure hunt. Practically: the wall is best done by bicycle, hired at the gate, early, and the full circuit takes under two hours. The 碑林 museum of steles is the quietest good museum in the city and is where the written register of this lesson is carved into stone. And the Muslim quarter around the Great Mosque is where lesson 93's food comes from, which is not a coincidence: Xi'an has had a Muslim Chinese community since the Tang, for exactly the reason lesson 94 explains.