The Most Beautiful Places in Shaanxi
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Shaanxi are Terracotta Army, Great Mosque of Xi'an and Mount Hua (Huashan). The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Shaanxi lies where the yellow Loess Plateau meets the Qinling Mountains, the range that divides northern and southern China. In the fertile Wei River valley stood Chang'an, today's Xi'an, capital of the Zhou, Qin, Han and Tang dynasties and the eastern starting point of the Silk Road. Few provinces hold so much of the early Chinese state in their soil, and the loess that buried its tombs also feeds the muddy Yellow River on the province's eastern edge.
The Terracotta Army, found by farmers digging a well in 1974, guards the burial complex of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, with thousands of individually modelled soldiers, horses and chariots. In Xi'an itself, the Ming-dynasty City Wall survives as one of the most complete fortified circuits in China, wide enough to cycle along its top. The Great Mosque of Xi'an, founded according to tradition in the Tang era, is built entirely in Chinese style, with courtyards, pavilions and a pagoda-like minaret instead of domes.
Beyond the city, Mount Hua is one of the Five Great Mountains of China, its granite peaks reached by steep stairways and the famous plank walk fixed to a cliff face. At Hukou on the Yellow River, the wide river suddenly squeezes into a narrow channel and pours over a rock step, throwing up clouds of ochre spray.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Great Mosque of Xi'an | Mosque | |
| 3 | Mount Hua (Huashan) | Mountain | |
| 4 | Xi'an City Wall | City walls | |
| 5 | Hukou Waterfalls | Waterfall |
01 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it.
Did you know? The army was not only soldiers: digs have also revealed acrobats, strongmen, musicians, officials and bronze cranes and ducks set in an underground park.
02 Great Mosque of Xi'an
People's Republic of China · 4.3 km from Xi'an34.263° N 108.937° E
Zossolino · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Great Mosque of Xi'an looks at first like a Chinese temple. Its prayer hall is a timber building with a turquoise-tiled hipped roof, painted wooden bracket sets and a six-columned porch, and the way to it leads through a sequence of walled courtyards with gardens, stone gateways and pavilions.
Did you know? Among its steles is one bearing calligraphy attributed to Mi Fu, the celebrated Song dynasty painter and calligrapher.
03 Mount Hua (Huashan)
People's Republic of China34.483° N 110.083° E
Image by LabMike from Pixabay Mount Hua is less a single summit than a cluster of granite towers raised steeply out of the plain of the Wei River in Shaanxi.
Did you know? The mountain was long counted as three peaks; the North Peak was added only after a new trail up the Hua Shan Gorge opened in the 3rd–5th centuries.
04 Xi'an City Wall
People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Xi'an34.253° N 108.942° E
xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0 Xi'an keeps one of the oldest, largest and best preserved city walls in China, and its scale is hard to grasp until you stand on top of it.
Did you know? Today 18 gates pierce the wall, but only four of them, Changle, Anding, Yongning and Anyuan, are original Ming gates.
05 Hukou Waterfalls
People's Republic of China36.147° N 110.444° E
Leruswing · CC BY-SA 3.0 At Hukou the Yellow River, around 300 metres wide just upstream, is suddenly squeezed into a rock channel less than 50 metres across and drops into it with a roar. The name means "kettle mouth" or "flask mouth": the whole river seems to pour out of the spout of a giant teapot.
Did you know? Downstream of the fall the river splits around two rocky islets called Mengmen; according to legend, Yu the Great cleaved a single mountain in two to free the river.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Shaanxi?
- On our list, Terracotta Army ranks first, followed by Great Mosque of Xi'an and Mount Hua (Huashan).
- Who built the Terracotta Army?
- It was made for Qin Shi Huang, who unified China in 221 BC, as part of his vast burial complex near Xi'an. The figures were rediscovered by local farmers in 1974.
- Why is the Great Mosque of Xi'an built like a Chinese temple?
- Muslim communities in China adopted local building traditions, so the mosque uses courtyards, wooden halls and tiled roofs. Its minaret takes the form of a pagoda-like pavilion.
- Why is the Hukou Waterfall yellow?
- The Yellow River carries huge amounts of silt eroded from the Loess Plateau, which gives the water and the spray at Hukou their ochre colour.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Shaanxi?
- In our collection, the places in Shaanxi are most often mountains (1), waterfalls (1), mosques (1) and mausoleums (1).
- How many places are on this list in Shaanxi?
- The list covers 5 places.