Xi'an City Wall — city walls
xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0

Xi'an City Wall

  • 2 min read
  • 34.253° N 108.942° E

Interesting facts

  • The Ming founder built the wall on the advice of the scholar Zhu Sheng: first raise high walls and store grain, then unify the realm.
  • During Japanese air raids in 1937–1940, residents dug around 1,000 bomb shelters into the base of the wall, which is over 15 metres thick.
  • The Xi'an City Wall International Marathon, first held in 1993, is run along the top of the ancient ramparts.
  • Today 18 gates pierce the wall, but only four of them, Changle, Anding, Yongning and Anyuan, are original Ming gates.
  • Restoration work in 1986 uncovered the Tang dynasty Hanguang Gate, about 1,400 years old, now preserved as a museum inside the wall.
  • The excavated Hanguang Gate had three gateways and is among the best-preserved Sui and Tang city gate sites found in China.
  • The wall encloses about 11.5 square kilometres, and the moat around it is about six metres deep.
  • Only in May 2005 were all the ramparts joined again, allowing a continuous circuit of the wall.
  • Walking the full circuit on top of the wall takes around four hours.

Why it is worth it

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. The rampart runs for about 13.7 kilometres in a long rectangle around the old centre, twelve metres high, fifteen to eighteen metres thick at the base and still twelve to fourteen metres wide at the top: broad enough for a road, and today used as one by walkers and cyclists. Outside, a moat about eighteen metres wide follows the line of the wall, and inside lies a grid of streets that still orients itself on the old gates.

The wall was begun in 1370, shortly after Zhu Yuanzhang founded the Ming dynasty as the Hongwu Emperor, and took some eight years to complete. Its builders did not start from nothing: they raised it on the line of the Tang dynasty imperial city, the palace and government quarter of Chang'an when it was the capital of the Tang. The first Ming wall was of rammed earth; the familiar skin of grey-blue brick was added in 1568, and crenels and drainage channels came with a further campaign in 1781. There are nearly six thousand crenels along the parapet, and bastions project from the wall at intervals of about 120 metres so that defenders could fire along its face.

What makes the gates remarkable is their layering. The main entrances were not single openings but defensive traps: an outer archery tower, its face pierced with rows of firing windows, stood in front of a walled chamber, so that attackers who broke through the first gate found themselves enclosed and under fire before they reached the city. Watchtowers stand at the four corners, and gate towers with barbicans guard the approaches. Restorations in the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and again from 1983, gave the wall its present unbroken circuit; in 2014 the southern embrasured watchtower of 1378, lost to fire in 1926, was restored. The wall has been a protected national monument since 1961 and is on China's tentative list for World Heritage.

Getting there

The wall surrounds central Xi'an. Xi'an Xianyang International Airport (XIY) lies about 27 km away. The main entrance is the South Gate, Yongningmen, next to Yongningmen station on Metro Line 2; bicycles can be rented on top of the wall at the main gates, and a full circuit by bike takes around two to three hours.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Shaanxi 5The Most Beautiful Places in the People's Republic of China 105The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in the People's Republic of China 8The Most Impressive City Walls 11The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 302

From the encyclopaedia

The fortifications of Xi'an in Shaanxi, also known as the Xi'an City Wall, represent one of the oldest, largest, and best preserved Chinese city walls. It was built under the rule of the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming dynasty to protect the city from the Northern Yuan and potential unrest. It exhibits the "complete features of the rampart architecture of feudal society". It has been refurbished many times since it was first built in the 14th century with the most important three reconstructions occurring in the late 1500s, in the late 1700s, and in 1983. The wall encloses an area of about 11.52 square kilometres (4.45 mi2).

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