Xi'an and the Terracotta Warriors: the Ancient Capital at the Heart of Chinese Civilization

Few cities on earth carry the weight of history that Xi'an bears. For more than a thousand years, across the reigns of thirteen Chinese dynasties and the rule of seventy-three emperors, this city in the Wei River valley of Shaanxi Province served as the capital of the Chinese empire. It was here that China was first unified under a single imperial rule. It was here that the great Silk Road began its journey westward across Central Asia, carrying Chinese silk, porcelain, and ideas to Persia, Rome, and the Mediterranean world, and returning with foreign religions, technologies, and peoples who transformed Chinese civilization. And it was here, beneath the dry loess soil of the Guanzhong Plain, that one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries in human history lay waiting for more than two thousand years to be found.

Xi'an is today a major city of approximately thirteen million people in the broader metropolitan area, capital of Shaanxi Province and one of China's most important historical and tourist destinations. It sits at the eastern end of the ancient Silk Road corridor, flanked by the Wei River to the north and the Qinling Mountains to the south, in a broad agricultural plain that has supported dense human habitation since at least the Neolithic period. The city is encircled by one of the best-preserved city walls in China, a massive Ming Dynasty fortification that still stands fourteen meters high and is wide enough at the top to bicycle around its fourteen-kilometer circumference.

Known in ancient times as Chang'an, meaning "Eternal Peace," the city that would become Xi'an was not merely a capital city in the administrative sense. It was for extended periods the largest city in the world, the most cosmopolitan urban center of its age, a place where Buddhist monks from India met Zoroastrian fire-worshippers from Persia, where Nestorian Christian missionaries from Syria debated with Confucian scholars in the eastern and western markets, where Arab merchants trading in silk and spices established communities alongside Japanese students come to learn from the greatest civilization of their age. At its peak during the Tang Dynasty, Chang'an covered approximately 84 square kilometers and housed a population that may have approached one million within the city walls, with another two million in the surrounding suburbs, making it the most populous urban agglomeration on the planet.

Today, most visitors come to Xi'an for a single purpose that overrides all others: to see the Terracotta Army. The eight thousand-plus clay soldiers, horses, and chariots that guard the tomb of the First Emperor of China represent one of the supreme achievements of ancient art and one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries ever made. But the Terracotta Army is only one layer of Xi'an's extraordinary archaeological and historical depth. To understand the city fully requires exploring the dynasties that made it great long before the First Emperor was born, and the cultures that survived long after his dynasty's collapse.

The Earliest Capitals: Zhou and Qin at Chang'an

Human settlement in the Wei River valley extends back to the Neolithic period, and the region had already been a center of political power for many centuries before the construction of the city we know as Xi'an. The Zhou Dynasty, which ruled China from approximately 1046 to 256 BCE, maintained capitals near the present site of the modern city, at places called Fenghao and later Luoyi. The Western Zhou period represents one of the foundational eras of Chinese civilization, during which the philosophical and political ideas that would define Chinese culture for millennia were first articulated: Confucian ethics, the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, the ritual and ceremonial systems that governed imperial rule.

The Qin state emerged from the western reaches of the Zhou world, a frontier kingdom that had long been looked down upon by the more cultured eastern states as semi-barbaric. The Qin ruling house, the Ying family, had spent centuries expanding their territory and developing military and administrative innovations that their eastern neighbors disdained but could not match. Under the leadership of a succession of capable rulers, the Qin state systematically defeated and absorbed each of the other Warring States kingdoms, completing the unification of China in 221 BCE.