Shannxi historical timeline

More Chinese history happened here than anywhere else, and the physical evidence is still coming out of the ground.

The first emperor

Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BC, standardised the script, the currency and the axle width of carts, and began the tomb complex near Xian that occupies some fifty square kilometres. The Terracotta Army guards its eastern approach; it was made by an estimated seven hundred thousand conscripted workers, and the figures were assembled from standardised parts with individually modelled heads. The tomb mound itself remains unopened, partly out of caution and partly because soil surveys show anomalous mercury concentrations consistent with the ancient account of rivers of mercury inside.

Han and Tang Chang’an

The Han capital here anchored the Silk Road, and under the Tang from 618 the city reached perhaps a million people on a planned grid of walled wards — the model for Japanese Kyoto and Nara. Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam all arrived along the road, and the Nestorian stele of 781 records a Christian church in the city.

Decline

The capital moved east after the Tang and Xian became provincial. A catastrophic earthquake in 1556 in this region killed an estimated 830,000 people, the deadliest on record.

Yanan

The Long March ended in the loess caves of Yanan in 1935, and the communist leadership was based there for over a decade.

The Xian Incident

In December 1936 Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped in Xian by two of his own generals, who demanded he stop fighting the communists and form a united front against Japan. He was held for a fortnight and released having broadly agreed. The episode almost certainly changed the course of the war and of Chinese history, and the hot-spring complex at Huaqing Pool where he was seized is now visited for that as much as for its Tang associations.

1974

Farmers digging a well struck a terracotta head, and the modern history of the province began again.