Shaanxi

Overview

Shaanxi is where the Chinese state began, and the province is still organised around that fact: the capitals, the imperial tombs and the Terracotta Army all sit in the Wei River valley around Xi’an, and every other trip radiates out from there. The Zhou, Han, Sui and Tang dynasties all governed from this valley, which is why Xi’an counts as one of China’s Four Ancient Capitals. Local tourism literature puts the tally at 13 dynasties, 73 emperors and 72 large imperial tombs, and the figures are not far off.

The province splits into three bands that run east to west. The centre is Guanzhong, “within the passes”, the flat and well-watered plain along the Wei where Xi’an, Xianyang, Baoji and Weinan sit and where almost everything imperial was built. North of it the Loess Plateau takes over: yellow earth cut into gullies, cave-house villages, and Yan’an, the Communist Party’s wartime base. South of the plain the Qinling Mountains mark the divide between north and south China, so that Hanzhong and Ankang on the far side of the range grow rice and tea and feel like a different country.

Most visitors give Xi’an two or three days for the warriors, the walls and the Muslim Quarter, then fly on. That works, but the province repays a week. Hua Shan, the Daoist mountain with the plank walk, is a day trip east. The Tang tombs at Qianling and Zhaoling and the Buddhist finger relic at Famen Temple are a long day to the northwest and west. The high-speed line to Yan’an that opened at the end of 2025 makes the loess country and the revolutionary caves a day trip, and the Chengdu line crosses the Qinling to Hanzhong’s rice country.

Shaanxi is also China’s northwest in miniature: dry, wheat-eating, lamb-loving, blunt in its speech, and the only place where the Silk Road, the First Emperor and Mao Zedong are all local history.

History & character

Zhou, Qin and the first empire

The Wei valley was the heartland of the Zhou kings and then of the state of Qin, whose kings used the four passes into the basin (Hangu to the east, Wu to the southeast, Xiao to the northwest and Dasan to the west) as a fortress from which to conquer the rest of China. The Qin king who finished the job in 221 BC had started work on his own tomb at Lintong in 246 BC, at the age of 13, when he took the throne; after unification, according to the historian Sima Qian, 700,000 men were sent from across the empire to build it, and the project ran until around 208 BC. His dynasty barely outlived him, and the region was briefly carved up as the “Three Qins” before the Han took over.

Han and Tang Chang’an

The Han built their capital, Chang’an, on the south bank of the Wei, on roughly the site of modern Xi’an. The Silk Road formally opened from here under Emperor Wu in the 130s BC, after the envoy Zhang Qian returned with reports of the kingdoms of Central Asia. The Tang rebuilt Chang’an as a planned grid of 84 km² with a peak population of around a million, for most of the first millennium AD the largest city on earth. Wu Zetian, the only woman to reign in her own name as emperor, ruled from here from 690 to 705 and is buried with her husband Gaozong at Qianling northwest of the city.

Guanzhong housed the capitals of 12 dynasties in all, including the four that Chinese historians treat as golden ages: Qin, Western Han, Sui and Tang. That run ended with the Tang, and the province never again held the capital.

The long provincial centuries

After the Tang collapsed, Guanzhong lost its political and economic weight as the capital moved east and then north. The province’s worst moment came in 1556, when an earthquake on the fault under the Wei valley killed an estimated 830,000 people, the deadliest in recorded history; part of the toll came from cave dwellings cut into the loess that collapsed on the people sleeping in them. The Ming walls of Xi’an, the Great Wall forts around Yulin and the mansions of Hancheng all date from this quieter, garrison-and-grain era.

Yan’an and the revolution

Between 1935 and 1947 the loess town of Yan’an in the north of the province was the centre of the Chinese Communist revolution. The Red Army entered the town in January 1937 without a fight, and Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the rest of the leadership spent the war years living and working in cave houses on its hillsides. Those caves are now the country’s most visited “red tourism” shrine.

Modern Shaanxi

Xi’an is now a city of 12.95 million people on the 2020 census, and the province has rebuilt an economy on coal, gas and aerospace: Shaanxi produces more than half of the research and manufacturing equipment for China’s domestic commercial aviation industry. The character on the ground is northwestern. The Guanzhong dialect, a variety of Central Plains Mandarin with around 22 million speakers, is still used fluently by about three quarters of young people in Xi’an, and locals like to claim it as the “real” Chinese because the Tang court spoke something like it. Manners are direct, portions are large, and the Hui Muslim community in the old city is a living reminder that this end of the Silk Road faced west for a thousand years.

See & do

The First Emperor’s necropolis

The Terracotta Army at Lintong is the pits, but the pits are only the outer edge of a much larger complex. The emperor’s own tomb mound, 76 m high and shaped like a truncated pyramid, stands about 1.5 km west of the warriors inside inner and outer walls of 2.5 km and 6.3 km circumference, and it has never been opened; soil tests show anomalously high mercury, which fits Sima Qian’s account of rivers of the metal flowing through the burial chamber. The whole site has been on the UNESCO list since 1987. The POI guide has the practicalities.

Han and Tang imperial tombs

Han Yangling, the tomb of Emperor Jing (r. 157 to 141 BC), is about 20 km north of central Xi’an on the north bank of the Wei, close to the airport. Its 86 outer pits held tens of thousands of terracotta figures about 50 cm tall, made naked and armless so they could be dressed in silk and fitted with wooden arms that have long since rotted; a hall built over part of the pits lets you look down on them in place, along with clay pigs, sheep, dogs and chickens.

The Tang tombs are scattered along the hills north of the plain, and two are worth the drive. Qianling, on Mount Liang 85 km northwest of Xi’an, is the joint tomb of Emperor Gaozong and Wu Zetian, built from 684 with work continuing until 706. The spirit way is lined with stone horses, lions, ostriches and officials and ends at 61 headless statues of the foreign envoys who attended Gaozong’s funeral, and a 7.5 m, 98-tonne stele for Wu Zetian that was deliberately left blank.

Zhaoling, on Jiuzong Mountain in Liquan County, is the tomb of Emperor Taizong and the largest of the Tang dynasty, ringed by some 200 tombs of relatives and officials. Its most famous carvings, the six war-horse reliefs known as the Six Steeds, are not on site: four are in the Stele Forest in Xi’an and two in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

Famen Temple

Famen Temple in Fufeng County, 120 km west of Xi’an, is the province’s great Buddhist site because of an accident. Half of its brick pagoda collapsed in heavy rain on 4 August 1981, and when the underground palace beneath was opened on 3 April 1987 it held a sealed Tang treasury: 121 gold and silver objects, 17 pieces of glass, secret-colour porcelain, more than 700 pieces of silk, and a finger bone venerated as a relic of the Buddha, nested in boxes of gold, silver and jade. The relic now sits in the 148 m Namaste Dagoba built beside the old temple in 2009, a structure whose scale divides opinion.

Hua Shan

Hua Shan, the Western Mountain of Daoism’s five sacred peaks, rises near Huayin 120 km east of Xi’an. Five summits form the massif: South Peak at 2,154.9 m is the highest, East, Centre and West all top 2,000 m, and North Peak, at 1,614.9 m, is where the cable car built in the 1990s deposits most visitors. The traditional way up is the 6 km gorge path from Huashan village to North Peak, first cut in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and the mountain’s reputation as one of the most dangerous hikes in the world comes from the ridges above it, now widened, railed and made one-way on the steepest sections.

Budget more than four hours for the walk to North Peak, or about two hours by the steeper “Soldier’s Way”, and 7 to 10 hours for the full circuit of North, East, South and West peaks. The plank walk (Changkong Zhandao) on the South Peak cliff is a foot-wide board bolted to the rock face with a harness hire of around 30 yuan; the last figures posted on Wikivoyage give a peak-season entry ticket of 180 yuan and 100 yuan in winter, valid two days, with the North Peak cable car at 80 yuan one way and the West Peak cable car at 120 to 140 yuan, but those prices date from around 2015 and will have risen.

Yan’an’s revolutionary sites

The caves are the point. The Yan’an Revolutionary Memorial Hall (08:00 to 16:00, last entry 15:30, free) sets out the party’s years here from 1935 to 1948; Yangjialing and Zaoyuan (also free) are the hillside cave compounds where Mao and the Politburo lived; and the Baota pagoda on the hill above town is the image on every poster, 65 yuan to enter the grounds and 10 more to climb it, 07:30 to 19:00. South of Yan’an on the new fast line, the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor at Huangling is the mythical burial place of the ancestor of the Chinese people, shaded by more than 60,000 cypresses of which 30,000 are said to be over a thousand years old; the annual state offering ceremony resumed in 2004.

Hukou Waterfall

East of Yan’an, 50 km beyond Yichuan County on the Shanxi border, the Yellow River squeezes from a broad bed into a 20 to 30 m slot and drops more than 20 m in a single brown roar. The fall is usually about 30 m wide and swells to 50 m in the summer flood, and at peak season more than 40,000 people a day come to watch it.

The northern frontier

Yulin’s Zhenbeitai, 7 km north of the city by bus 3 or 5, is the largest fortress on the entire Great Wall (07:30 to 19:30, 30 yuan), and Hongshixia gorge nearby holds 44 cave chambers, pagodas and cliff inscriptions (07:00 to 19:00, 30 yuan). Further out in Jingbian County, at the southern edge of the Mu Us sands, the ruins of Tongwancheng are the capital that the Xiongnu ruler Helian Bobo built in 419 AD with walls of steamed earth whitened with clay and rice powder; the Yong’an platform has been restored and the rest is still half-buried in the desert.

Hanzhong and the Three Kingdoms

South of the Qinling, the Wuhou Temple at Mianxian is the national shrine to Zhuge Liang, the Zhang Qian Memorial Hall at Chenggu commemorates the Silk Road envoy, and the Cai Lun Paper Culture Museum at Yangxian is dedicated to the man credited with inventing paper.

Towns & cities

Xi’an

Xi’an is the provincial capital, the transport hub and the reason most people come. The Ming walls of 1370 still enclose the historical core, and the sights you would cross the world for are either inside them or within an hour’s ride: the Terracotta Army at Lintong, the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda and the Small Wild Goose Pagoda in the southern suburbs. Two museums are worth naming even in a province summary: the Shaanxi History Museum, opened in 1991 next to the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda with more than 370,000 objects including Tang tomb murals, and the Stele Forest inside the walls, nearly 3,000 inscribed stones founded on the site of the prefectural school in 1087. The city guide covers the rest.

Hancheng

Hancheng sits where the Yellow River leaves its gorge and enters the Guanzhong plain, about 200 km northeast of Xi’an, and is the best-preserved old town in the province: more than 140 protected sites from the Tang to the Qing, a National Historic and Cultural City since 1986. The local hero is Sima Qian, born nearby around 145 BC and buried outside the town; his Records of the Grand Historian is the founding work of Chinese history writing, and his temple and tomb outside the town are the main pilgrimage.

Hancheng is a coal and power town as well as a heritage one; it runs the biggest power plant in western China, and the two faces sit side by side.

Yan’an

Yan’an is the loess plateau’s capital in every sense, a city of about 2.26 million people set at 960 m in a gully system of yellow hills, with the Lingshan Pagoda on Baota Mountain as its emblem. It is the “Cradle of the Revolution” in the official phrase, and the cave-house headquarters of the wartime Communist Party are the reason for the tour buses. Beyond the shrines it is a useful base for the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor to the south and the Hukou Waterfall on the Yellow River to the east.

Yulin

Yulin, at the top of the province where Shaanxi meets Inner Mongolia, is a coal city on the edge of the Ordos Desert; tree planting has held the sand back, but the climate is semi-arid, with only 433 mm of rain a year. The draw is the Ming frontier: the Great Wall tower of Zhenbeitai just north of town, and a walled old town whose lanes and courtyard houses have survived largely intact. Mizhi County, south of the city on the Wuding River, is the loess plateau at its most photogenic and the place where the rebel Li Zicheng built himself a temporary palace in the 1640s.

Hanzhong

Hanzhong lies in the Han River basin between the Qinling to the north and the Daba Mountains to the south, and gave its name to the Han dynasty: Liu Bang was made lord of Hanzhong before he won the empire. It is a Three Kingdoms town and a Silk Road town, with a city of 3.2 million people on the 2020 census and a humid, subtropical feel that has nothing in common with Xi’an. For most Chinese visitors it means one thing: the rapeseed fields that turn the whole basin yellow in spring.

Ankang and Baoji

Ankang, further down the Han River in the southeast corner where Shaanxi meets Hubei, Chongqing and Sichuan, is subtropical hill country with a January average of 3.7°C and a city of 2.5 million people that few foreign travellers see. Baoji, at the western end of the Guanzhong plain where the Wei valley narrows into the mountains, is the rail junction towards Gansu and home to the Baoji Bronze Museum, more than 120,000 objects, most of them Zhou dynasty bronzes dug out of the surrounding farmland.

Food & drink

Shaanxi eats wheat, lamb and vinegar. The provincial cuisine is built on noodles and mutton, seasoned hard with salt, garlic, onion, vinegar and chilli in a style locals call “fragrant spicy”, and it uses almost no sugar; steaming, frying and stir-frying do most of the work. It divides in three, like the province: northern Shaanxi cooking leans on steaming and millet, Guanzhong balances pork and lamb, and Hanzhong in the south is the spiciest and eats rice.

Biangbiang mian are the headline: very wide, thick, chewy hand-pulled wheat noodles in a sauce heaped with chilli, garlic and vinegar. Yangrou paomo is the cold-weather meal: flatbread torn into small pieces and cooked in mutton or beef broth. You do the tearing yourself before handing the bowl back, and the smaller your pieces, the better the soup soaks in. Roujiamo, a baked bun split and stuffed with stewed meat, is the dish that escaped; it is sold all over China now but this is where it comes from. Liangpi, cold wheat noodles in chilli and vinegar, is the summer lunch.

Two less exported Xi’an dishes deserve a try. Hulatang is a rich, peppery soup, and one of the most popular things in Xi’an. Hulutou, “gourd head”, is pig’s large intestine, so named because the cut looks like the top of a gourd; it is a serious local institution and not for the squeamish. Guokui is the flatbread of the countryside, a foot across and an inch thick.

The Muslim Quarter in Xi’an is where the Hui community cooks the lamb side of the menu, skewers and paomo above all, and the city guide has the detail. Outside the capital, the plate changes with the landscape. Yan’an’s specialities are mutton soup, hand-made noodles, tofu dishes and anything made with red dates. Yulin on the desert edge grills donkey meat. Hanzhong’s mianpi are cold rice noodles, not wheat, in a sour and spicy dressing with cucumber and carrot, and beef noodles are the other local staple.

The drink is Xifeng jiu, distilled at Liulin in Fengxiang, in the Baoji countryside west of Xi’an. It was named one of China’s four famous spirits at the 1952 national appraisal, is the only representative of its own “feng” fragrance category, with apple and cherry on the nose, and about 70 per cent of the 50,000 tonnes made each year never leaves the province.

Nature

The Loess Plateau covers about 635,000 km², a fifteenth of China, across Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu and Qinghai, and the northern third of Shaanxi is its most eroded heart. The loess is wind-blown silt piled 100 m deep near the Yellow River and 200 to 300 m deep further west, and it is so easily cut that gully erosion produces most of the sediment here; more than 90 per cent of the mud that makes the Yellow River yellow comes off this plateau.

The plateau’s vernacular house is the yaodong, a cave dug straight into a loess cliff, down around a sunken courtyard, or built as a free-standing arch where the ground will not take a tunnel. The earth insulates so well that the rooms need little heating in winter and stay as cool as an air-conditioned room in summer, which is why, as late as the early 2000s, between 30 and 40 million people in northern China still lived in them. The most famous ones are in Yan’an.

Guanzhong in the middle is a crescent-shaped basin of river alluvium along the Wei, closed by the Qinling to the south and by lower ranges to the north, with about 600 mm of rain and a mean of 13°C: the farmland that fed the dynasties.

The Qinling Mountains are the biological event. The range is the watershed between the Yellow River and the Yangtze and the geographical line between north and south China; Mount Taibai, its summit, stands 3,767 m about 100 km west of Xi’an and is the highest mountain in eastern China, with cirques and moraines left by ice-age glaciers and a nature reserve of 56,325 hectares created around it in 1965.

The forests hold the Qinling giant panda, a distinct subspecies numbering an estimated 250 to 280 animals, around a fifth of all wild pandas, along with the golden snub-nosed monkey, the golden takin and some 3,000 rare plant species. Foping National Nature Reserve, 350 km² of forest between 1,080 and 2,094 m founded in 1978, carried a stable population of around 64 pandas through its first two decades and keeps roads out of its interior, so sightings are for researchers rather than tourists; Changqing is the other panda reserve in the range. The crested ibis, thought extinct in China until it was rediscovered in 1981, survives in the wild only in Yangxian County in the Hanzhong basin.

South of the range the Han River runs east through the Hanzhong and Ankang basins with the Daba Mountains closing the far side, and the vegetation switches to bamboo, paddy and tea: the north-south line drawn on Chinese maps is a line you can see from the train window.

Climate

Shaanxi’s annual mean runs from about 8°C in the north to 16°C in the south, so a single trip can move between climate zones. Xi’an and the Guanzhong plain are continental: January averages −0.5°C, July 26.9°C, and 672 mm of rain falls mostly between July and late October, which makes late summer the wet season rather than the spring. Sunshine is modest at 1,871 hours a year, and haze is common in winter. The record high of 42.3°C was set as recently as July 2025.

The loess north is colder, drier and clearer. Yan’an averages −5.5°C in January and 23.1°C in July with 511 mm of rain, almost half of it in July and August. Yulin on the desert edge sees January averages around −14°C and only 433 mm of rain. Spring on the plateau is windy and dusty.

The mountains make their own weather. Foping in the Qinling gets 950 to 1,200 mm a year, most of it July to September, with snow at altitude, and Hua Shan’s exposed East Peak can sit near zero with wind chill even in summer.

South of the range the numbers flip to humid subtropical. Hanzhong gets 853 mm a year with hot, sticky summers, and Ankang averages 3.7°C in January and 27°C in July with its rain concentrated from June to September. Pack for both halves if you are crossing the Qinling.

When to go

September and October are the province’s best weeks: the summer rain has passed, the plain is dry and clear, Hua Shan gives you its views, and the loess plateau is in harvest colours. April and May are the second choice, warm before the heat and with Hanzhong’s rapeseed festival running from March into April to open the season.

Chinese public holidays, above all the first week of October and the May Day break, turn the Terracotta Army and Hua Shan into queues; the China guide has the dates. Yan’an is busiest around party anniversaries, and the Hukou Waterfall is at its widest, and most crowded, during the summer flood.

Attractions in the north run seasonal pricing: Hua Shan’s peak season is March to November, with the cheaper winter rate from December to February, and Yan’an’s sites use the same 1 March to 30 November split. Winter is dry, cold and far quieter, with a chance of snow on the plain and the Hua Shan paths brushed clear by a crew of workers so that the mountain stays open all year, though you will want gloves and boots with grip. Summer works for the mountains and the south if you start early; the plain is hot and wet in July and August and the outdoor approach to the warriors is punishing at midday.

Getting there

Xi’an Xianyang International Airport (XIY), 25 km northwest of the city centre, is the busiest airport in northwest China, with 48.5 million passengers in 2025 and a new Terminal 5, larger than the other three terminals combined, that opened on 20 February 2025. International routes include Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai, Istanbul, Paris, London and Melbourne, and the domestic network reaches every major city. Metro Line 14 has linked the airport to Xi’an North railway station since September 2019, and the airport bus (25 yuan, about an hour, running from 08:00 to 01:00) goes to the city centre.

By rail, Xi’an is the hub of the northwest. Xi’an North, 10 km north of the centre, opened in 2011 with 34 platforms, the largest station in northwest China, and handles the high-speed lines from Zhengzhou, Baoji, Datong, Chengdu and Yinchuan; it sits on Metro Lines 2, 4 and 14. From Beijing the direct trains have run via Zhengzhou since the end of 2012; Zhengzhou itself is under two hours away. From Chengdu the line opened in December 2017 cut the journey from 16 hours to under three, boring 127 km of tunnels through the Qinling on the way, six of them longer than 10 km.

For the rest of the province, three regional airports save long drives. Yan’an Nanniwan has flights from several Chinese cities, with an airport bus into town for 20 yuan on all routes. Hanzhong Chenggu Airport has daily flights to Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Yulin Yuyang Airport, about 17 km from the city, has daily connections to Beijing and Xi’an, with a 25 yuan shuttle bus into town. Coming from Chongqing or Guangxi, flying to Xi’an remains the practical answer until the Chongqing high-speed line opens.

Getting around

Inside Xi’an the metro does the work: 13 lines, 423 km and 284 stations, including Line 9, extended in December 2024 to Qinlingxi in Lintong District near the Terracotta Army. The classic route to the warriors is still bus 306, also signed Tourist Bus 5, from the east side of the forecourt at Xi’an Railway Station, 7 yuan and about an hour, up to three in traffic; bus 307 and the local minibus 914 do the same run for the same fare. The city guide covers taxis, cards and the walls.

Hua Shan is the easiest excursion. High-speed trains from Xi’an North reach Huashan North in 33 to 45 minutes for 34.5 to 54.5 yuan; the slower K trains to the older Hua Shan station take 1.5 to 2 hours, and coaches from the south car park of the railway station take about two hours for 33 yuan one way. From either station a minibus or taxi runs to the ticket office, and park shuttle buses from there to the cable car stations cost 20 to 40 yuan depending on the gate.

Yan’an and the north changed in December 2025 when the 304 km Xi’an to Yan’an high-speed railway opened, built for 350 km/h and cutting the journey from two and a half hours to a little over one, with stops at Tongchuan, Huangling West for the Yellow Emperor’s tomb, and Luochuan on the way. Yulin is still a long haul: about eight hours by bus from Xi’an and four from Yan’an, which is why the flight makes sense.

Hanzhong is about 1.5 hours from Xi’an on the Chengdu line. Hancheng and the Tang tombs are the awkward ones: the tombs at Qianling, Zhaoling and Han Yangling and the temple at Famen are spread across the counties north and west of the plain with no rail link between them, so a hired car and driver for the day, arranged through a Xi’an hotel or a booking app, is how most people do the tomb circuit, and the same goes for Foping and the Qinling reserves, where public roads stop at the reserve boundary. Self-driving is impractical for most foreign visitors; see the China guide for the licence rules.