History
The Terracotta Army: a world built for an emperor
Read the ranks as archaeology: imperial ambition, organised craftsmanship and the work of piecing a buried world together.
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History
Xi’an’s city wall: reading the city from above
The wall belongs to a later chapter than the Terracotta Army or Tang Chang’an. That is what makes it such a useful viewpoint.
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History
Tang Chang’an: finding a capital that changed shape
Palaces, markets and Buddhist connections explain a city whose original footprint is larger than the familiar walled centre.
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The Bell Tower and Xi’an’s shifting centre
The familiar relocation story opens a larger question: how did a city’s centre move, and what do the records actually establish?
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History
Xuanzang: the traveller behind Journey to the West
A Buddhist scholar’s search for texts connects Chang’an with a much wider world than the later novel alone suggests.
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Zhang Qian: a mission that changed what Han China knew
A diplomatic journey, not a plan for a tourist route, stands behind one of the best-known Silk Roads stories.
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Why is Xi’an called Xi’an? Nine names, one city
The name Xi’an dates only from 1369, yet this ground has carried nine recorded names. What each one meant, and where the layers still show.
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The Terracotta Army was painted: what was lost
Every figure was finished in colour over a layer of lacquer. Almost all of it left within minutes of excavation, and that loss is the real story.
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Christianity reached Tang China in 635
A limestone block cut in 781 and buried for centuries records, in Chinese and Syriac, how a monk called Alopen was escorted into Chang’an.
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The Silk Road: what actually left Chang’an
The name is modern and the route was never a single road. What the caravans carried, how far each one travelled, and what a Han mission really achieved.
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History
Wu Zetian: what the record can prove
China’s only woman to rule as emperor left a tomb, a blank stele and no contemporary biography. What the surviving histories can and cannot establish.
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The Big Wild Goose Pagoda: what is actually Tang
The temple beside it is Ming, not Tang, and the pagoda has been five storeys, ten, and seven. What the Xi’an records say about the tower.
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Where Tang Chang’an actually is
Most of the Tang capital lies under modern Xi’an. What survives above ground, what has been excavated, and how the city was laid out in the first place.
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Foreigners in Tang Chang’an: the West Market crowd
Sogdian merchants, Persian traders and students who stayed: who you would have passed in the Tang capital, and what the law said about them.
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Daming Palace: how to visit a palace that survives as a site
Read the Tang palace through its layout and archaeology, then choose a manageable route through the heritage park.
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