西安：古都是一种堆叠

Xi'an is called an ancient capital, a phrase that trips off the tongue so easily it ends up blocking certain questions.

For instance: today's Xi'an city wall actually has very little to do with Tang-dynasty Chang'an.

The surviving wall was built in the early Ming, more than six hundred years ago.

The city's most brilliant period was the Tang, seven hundred years before the wall.

Tang Chang'an extended far beyond the area the wall now encloses, with a population approaching a million.

Put another way, riding a circuit on the wall takes you around only a small part of Tang Chang'an.

Once you grasp that, Xi'an stops being a vague ancient capital and becomes a city you can read in layers.

On the first day I set the Terracotta Army aside and went up on the wall.

The wall is wide enough to ride two abreast, and a circuit is about thirteen point seven kilometres.

Riding along it, left and right are two forms of city.

Inside, the streets are narrow and the buildings low, holding the density of the old town.

Outside are broad roads, high-rise housing and commercial districts.

A six-hundred-year-old wall still functioning as a structural dividing line is now rare in a large Chinese city.

Tang Chang'an had another identity as well: the eastern end of the Silk Road.

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

What they carried was more than goods.

Foreign music, religion, dance and food all entered the city, and became fashionable during the Tang.

Large numbers of foreigners lived long-term on the streets of Chang'an, trading, studying, holding office, even settling permanently.

Understanding Xi'an as a closed inland capital is in fact a fairly recent misreading.

In the afternoon I went to the Muslim Quarter.

It's usually written up as a street-food street, a description that isn't wrong, only thin.

This area is the core of Xi'an's Hui community, and the mosque nearby traces back to a very early period.

Among the Hui's forebears were merchants who arrived along the Silk Road, and soldiers and artisans who moved in over successive dynasties.

A thousand years of residence has produced a distinctive cuisine, a distinctive street fabric, and distinctive community ties.

Today's Muslim Quarter is intensely commercialized, densely crowded, and not cheap.

Plenty of locals complain that it is no longer what it was.

But turn into one of the side lanes and the rhythm changes at once.

Old men play chess in doorways, children cut through the alley on their way home, people pray in the mosque.

Tourism has pushed one street to the front; the community itself continues living behind it.

I ate yangrou paomo at a shop.

The waiter hands over a flatbread and an empty bowl.

You have to crumble the bread yourself — the smaller the pieces, the better the broth soaks in.

I spent nearly twenty minutes at it, until my fingers ached.

The old man at the next table glanced over and said three words: too big.

The dish hands part of the labour back to the diner.

It forces you to slow down, and makes you take part in the cooking before you eat.

In an era organized entirely around efficiency, that design almost reads as resistance.

The next day I went to the Terracotta Army.

The pits sit about forty kilometres east of Xi'an and form part of the tomb complex of the first Qin emperor.

Standing at the edge of Pit One looking down, the first sensation is the pressure of sheer quantity.

Thousands of figures stand in formation, and no two faces are alike.

They were made more than two thousand two hundred years ago.

The way they surfaced had no drama at all: in 1974, several farmers digging a well for water turned up pottery fragments.

One of China's most significant archaeological discoveries came out of ordinary labour in search of water.

There is one thing in the exhibition halls that is regularly overlooked.

These figures originally carried painted colour.

Once out of the ground and exposed to air, the pigment curled and flaked away within a very short time.

The grey legions we see today are a faded army.

Precisely for that reason, archaeological work was deliberately slowed until the technique matured, and large areas remain unexcavated.

Leaving material in the ground is sometimes the more responsible decision.

That runs directly counter to what the tourism industry expects.

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

The lights came on in sequence, and the wall's outline emerged from the dark.

I thought about that circuit on the bicycle earlier in the day.

In a single day I had passed through a Ming wall, the memory of the Tang, a Hui community a thousand years old, and a clay army from twenty-two centuries ago.

They belong to different layers of time, yet they share the same piece of ground.

What "ancient capital" actually refers to is this stacking, rather than any one particular era.

If you only had one day, would you go and see that most famous army first, or ride around the city once and establish how large it really is?