Shannxi Culture & Language

Shaanxi’s culture is layered over an imperial past that is physically present everywhere.

The Great Mosque

Founded in 742 and rebuilt over centuries, Xian’s Great Mosque is arranged as a series of Chinese courtyards with pavilions, screen walls and a minaret in the form of a pagoda. Arabic calligraphy appears in Chinese compositional styles. It is a working mosque, quiet a few metres from the loudest food street in the city, and it is the clearest single illustration of how thoroughly Islam localised in China.

Qinqiang

Shaanxi opera, and the oldest of the major forms — its bangzi clapper-beat style influenced Peking opera. It is sung at enormous volume with a harsh, declamatory delivery, and is performed in city parks by amateurs as well as on stage.

Loess folk art

Paper cutting, peasant painting from Huxian, and the waist drum dance of Ansai — hundreds of performers in white headscarves drumming and leaping in unison, which became a symbol of the Yanan period and is genuinely thrilling to watch.

Calligraphy

The Forest of Steles museum holds over three thousand inscribed stones, including the classics carved in stone in the Tang, and is a pilgrimage for calligraphers.

The Nestorian stele

A stone erected in 781 and rediscovered in the seventeenth century records the arrival of a Christian mission from Persia in 635, its reception by the Tang court and the building of a monastery in the capital. It is carved in Chinese with a Syriac inscription down the side, and it is the single most striking piece of evidence for how open Tang Chang’an was. It stands in the Beilin stele museum.

Tang revival

Xian markets itself heavily on Tang costume and performance, which is popular with Chinese visitors.

Mandarin is universal. The local Guanzhong dialect is a northern variety with its own vocabulary and a distinctive flat, forceful delivery that Chinese speakers identify immediately; it is closer to standard Mandarin than the southern dialects but still noticeably different.

Arabic appears in the Muslim quarter on signage and in religious use, though the Hui community speaks Chinese.

English is limited outside the main hotels and the Terracotta Army site, though Xian sees enough foreign visitors that the tourist infrastructure copes. Elsewhere a translation app is necessary.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao, xie xie, duo shao qian for how much, bu yao xiang cai for no coriander, and mai dan for the bill.

Ordering by pointing at what someone else is eating is entirely normal and works.