西安：城墙比长安年轻

Xi'an's most famous thing is outside the city, but the best place to understand the city is inside it.

Most visitors get off the plane and head straight for the Terracotta Army.

I put the Terracotta Army off until the second day, and went up on the city wall first.

Xi'an's wall is about thirteen point seven kilometres around, and wide enough to ride two abreast.

A full circuit takes a bit over an hour.

Riding along the top, the left and right sides are two different worlds.

Inside the wall is the old city: narrow streets, low buildings.

Outside the wall are wide roads and tall towers.

A single wall separating two kinds of city is something you rarely see in China now.

That said, this wall isn't as old as many people assume.

The wall you see today was built in the Ming dynasty, more than six hundred years ago.

Its real significance is that it preserves the outline of a much earlier city.

More than a thousand years ago this place was called Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty.

Tang Chang'an was several times larger than today's walled area, with a population approaching a million.

In the world at that time, Chang'an was one of the largest cities there was.

Chang'an was also the eastern starting point of the Silk Road.

Heading west from Chang'an, caravans had to cross the Hexi Corridor, desert, and the oases of Central Asia.

What they brought back was more than goods.

Foreign music, religion, dance and food all entered this city as well.

The streets of Tang Chang'an held large numbers of foreigners, doing business, studying, settling in.

So Xi'an's connection to the outside world is not something from the last few decades.

In the afternoon I went to the Muslim Quarter.

A lot of people write it up as a street food street.

That description isn't wrong, but it's shallow.

This area is the core of Xi'an's Hui community, and the mosque beside it has a long history.

Among the Hui's ancestors were merchants who came along the Silk Road, and soldiers who moved here later.

A thousand years of living here has produced its own food and its own streets.

Today's Muslim Quarter is very commercial, crowded, and not cheap.

But walk into one of the small lanes beside it and you see a different rhythm.

Old people sit in doorways, children come home from school, and people pray in the mosque.

I ate yangrou paomo at one shop.

The waiter gives you a flatbread and an empty bowl first.

You have to break the bread into small pieces yourself — the smaller the better — and then hand it to the kitchen for soup.

I spent nearly twenty minutes breaking bread.

The old man next to me glanced over and said one line: your pieces are too big.

The process itself is part of the meal.

It forces you to slow down, and it makes you a participant alongside the cook.

The next day I went to the Terracotta Army.

The pits are about forty kilometres east of Xi'an.

Standing at the edge of a pit looking down, the most immediate impression is quantity.

Thousands of figures stand in formation, and every face is different.

These figures were made more than two thousand two hundred years ago.

The way they were discovered is interesting.

In 1974, several local farmers digging a well for water turned up pottery fragments.

One of China's most famous archaeological finds came out of a search for water.

While visiting, I noticed something that often gets overlooked.

The figures were originally painted.

Once they came out of the ground and met the air, the colour disappeared very quickly.

The grey army we see today isn't what they originally looked like.

As conservation technique improved, archaeological work actually slowed down, and many areas still haven't been excavated.

Leaving things in the ground is sometimes the more responsible choice.

At dusk I went back to the foot of the wall.

The lights came on and the outline of the wall grew clear.

I thought about that circuit on the bike in the daytime.

In one day I'd passed a Ming wall, Tang Chang'an, a Hui community a thousand years old, and an army from twenty-two centuries ago.

They don't sit in the same span of time, yet they are crowded onto the same piece of ground.

If you only had one day, would you go and see that famous army first, or ride around the city once and work out how big it is?