Xi'an

The plain around Xi'an has held capitals for longer than almost anywhere in China. The Western Zhou ruled from Haojing nearby in the 11th century BC; the Qin governed their unified empire from Xianyang across the river, and their first emperor was buried east of the modern city with the army of clay figures found in 1974. From 202 BC the Han built Chang'an on the site, a walled capital of markets and palaces from which Zhang Qian's missions opened the routes west that became the Silk Road.

Tang Chang'an, laid out from 582 on a grid of walled wards, was the high point: a planned city of perhaps a million people within the walls, with foreign merchants, Sogdian traders, Persian and Central Asian communities, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians and the Buddhist translation workshops of the monk Xuanzang, who returned from India in 645 and whose scriptures were housed in the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. Rebellion and the fall of the Tang in 907 ended the city's imperial role, and the capital moved east for good.

Xi'an became a provincial centre. The Ming rebuilt its walls in the 14th century on a smaller footprint than Tang Chang'an, and those walls still stand. Hui uprisings devastated Shaanxi in the 1860s. In December 1936 the Xi'an Incident, in which Chiang Kai-shek was detained by his own generals at Huaqing, forced the united front against Japan. After 1949 the city was rebuilt as an industrial and aerospace centre, and since the 1980s the Terracotta Army has made it one of the most visited places in China, with metro lines, high-speed rail and new districts spreading far beyond the wall.

Xi'an treats its imperial past as a living identity. Tang dress is worn for photographs in the streets around the pagodas, Tang-style shopping quarters have been built in Qujiang and near the east gate, and the city's museums, steles and tomb figures are part of everyday civic pride rather than a specialist interest. Shaanxi's older performing traditions survive alongside: Qinqiang, a loud, direct form of opera accompanied by wooden clappers, shadow puppetry, paper cutting and drum troupes from the villages to the north.

The Hui Muslim community, settled here since the Silk Road centuries, is central to the city's character. Its mosques are built in Chinese temple style, its cooks run much of the best-known food, and the Muslim Quarter is a residential neighbourhood of families, schools and businesses as well as a place visitors come to eat. Xi'an is also a university city, with a large student population that fills the bars and cafés around Xiaozhai and gives the place a young feel out of proportion to its age.

Local manners are those of inland China: meals ordered for the table, tea poured for others before oneself, and a blunt, humorous Shaanxi speech that people elsewhere find distinctive. Hospitality is generous and insistent, and guests are expected to be pressed to eat and drink more than they intend.

Around 13 million people live in the Xi'an municipality, which spreads from the Wei river across the plain to the foot of the Qinling mountains. Most of them live in apartment blocks well outside the wall, in districts that have grown enormously since the 1990s, commuting by metro, bus or electric scooter to work in the technology parks, universities and factories of the south and west.

The economy rests on aerospace and defence engineering, electronics and semiconductors, car manufacturing, higher education and research — the city has one of the largest concentrations of universities in inland China — and on tourism, which employs large numbers around the wall and in Lintong. Wheat, maize and fruit farming continue on the plain, and its orchards supply markets elsewhere in China.

The day starts early with breakfast bought at a street stall, and ends late: the food streets run until midnight and older residents dance and exercise in the squares and parks in the cool of the evening. Winter is dominated by the heating season and the haze it brings, and summer by heat that pushes life outdoors after dark. Current concerns are air quality, water supply on a dry plain, traffic, the cost of housing, and the pressure of visitor numbers on a small historic core.

Xi'an's food is wheat-based, strongly spiced and distinct from the rice cooking of southern China. The signature dish is yangrou paomo, a mutton or beef broth poured over a flatbread that diners crumble into small pieces by hand at the table, served with pickled garlic and chilli paste. Roujiamo, sometimes called a Chinese hamburger, is stewed pork, or cumin-scented beef in the Muslim Quarter, chopped into a baked flatbread; liangpi are cold, slippery noodles of wheat or rice starch in vinegar, garlic and chilli oil; and biangbiang mian are belt-wide hand-stretched noodles whose name is written with one of the most complicated characters in Chinese.

The Hui kitchens of the Muslim Quarter supply much of this and more: lamb skewers with cumin, nan-style breads baked against the sides of ovens, fried persimmon cakes, mutton dumpling soup, and sweet rice with dates. Soup-filled dumplings and a banquet of many small dumpling varieties are Xi'an restaurant traditions, and older Shaanxi restaurant dishes appear on formal menus.

Drinking is straightforward: tea, hot soy milk at breakfast, local beer, rice wine and, increasingly, coffee in the student districts. Pomegranates and persimmons, walnuts and other fruit from the countryside around the city, and mijiu, a sweet fermented rice drink sold hot from the stalls, round out what the city offers on its streets.