The Walls of Xi'an

 After the terracotta soldiers, the next most famous attribute of Xi'an is its city wall.   You can climb to the top, rent a bike, and do laps around it's 8 1/2 mile perimeter.  The wall is almost perfectly preserved.  They've poked some extra holes in it for modern traffic, as the photo below shows.  But other than that, the wall stands unchanged from the time it was built, during the Ming Dynasty around 500 years ago.

But as impressive as these walls may be, they are, in fact, the result of downsizing.  The Xi'an of Ming times was a pale shadow of what the city used to be.  For 1000 years or more, Xi'an was the principal city of China.  Our friend with the Terracotta Soldiers, Qin Shi Huang, started it all when he unified China and made the city his capital back in 221 BC.  It then continued as the imperial city through the Han Dynasty, the Sui Dynasty, and the Tang Dynasty.   When the Tang Dynasty collapsed in 907 AD, the power and prosperity moved away from Xi'an. 

Actually, for most of it's history, the city was named Chang'an.  Chang (长) is the word for "long".  An (安) is the word for "peace".  So the city name translates as "long peace"....or more poetically "enduring peace".  For 200 years, during the Han Dynasty, Chang'an was the most populous city in the world.  It lost that distinction to Rome, about the time of the birth of Christ.  Around 600 AD, it regained its standing as the worlds-largest-city and held it through the next 300 years of the Tang Dynasty.  It held over a million people within its walls during that time.

After the Tang empire, the city languished for 600 years, like Rome during the Dark Ages.  In 1500 AD, the Ming Dynasty had been in power for 200 years and was prospering from its imperial center in Beijing.  By 1500 AD, the Ming had already built the Forbidden City and and rebuilt the Great Wall.  The Ming made Chang'an a provincial seat and renamed it as Xi'an.  They rebuilt the city walls, though with an enclosure considerably reduced from the time of the Tang.  The new area of Xi'an was about 10 times smaller than Chang'an was in it's heyday.

By the way, the name Xi'an , given by the Ming, translates as "Western Peace".  I suppose they preferred this name as neither so regal nor ambitious as "enduring peace")

A colleague told me that many cities in China used to have impressive walls.  Many cities retained their walls well into the 20th century.  But many of the walls were pulled down during the Cultural Revolution, in the 1960s and 1970s.  Pulled down because they were symbols of the old culture and old ways.  In any event, the walls of Xi'an escaped that fate. 

The photo above is a view from atop of the walls of Xi'an.  You can see the bikers biking and the strollers strolling.  There is more than enough room for all.  The walls are 40 feet wide, or so,  at the top.  I think it is the only paved structure of this size in China where you do not need to fear for getting run over by a city bus. 

These days, the walls of Xi'an no longer mark the boundaries of the city.  The new Xi'an stretches in all directions beyond the walls.  The population is around 10 million or so and growing.  Growing mostly by migration rather than by reproduction.  The countryside around Xi'an is famously agricultural and notoriously poor.  The sons and daughters of poor farmers come to Xi'an to seek a modern future.  It's the same in Suzhou and Nanjing and every other major city in China.