Shannxi
Discover Shannxi
Introduction
Shaanxi is where China began. The Wei river valley, a broad corridor of fertile loess in the middle of the province, held the capital of eleven dynasties, and the province is effectively an open archaeological record of the first two thousand years of the Chinese state.
Xi’an is the city at its centre. It was Chang’an, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and, under the Tang, probably the largest city in the world, with a foreign quarter of Persians, Sogdians and Arabs. Its Ming walls still enclose the old centre completely — fourteen kilometres of them, walkable or cyclable the whole way round. East of the city, farmers digging a well in 1974 hit the Terracotta Army: some eight thousand life-sized soldiers, each with a different face, buried to guard the first emperor.
Beyond Xi’an the province runs from the Qinling mountains — the climatic divide between northern and southern China, and one of the last strongholds of wild giant pandas — north onto the loess plateau, where people still live in cave houses cut into the hillsides. Yan’an, up there, was where the Long March ended and the Communist Party spent a decade. The food is northern: hand-pulled noodles, flatbread, cumin and lamb, and a Muslim quarter in Xi’an that has been cooking for a thousand years.