Great Mosque of Xi'an

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. There is no dome, and no conventional minaret. Only the orientation gives the game away: instead of facing south like most Chinese religious buildings, the whole complex is laid out on a long east–west axis, so that worshippers in the hall at its western end face Mecca.

Tradition dates the mosque's foundation to around 742, when the Tang capital Chang'an, as Xi'an was then called, was one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world, home to merchants and craftsmen from West Asia. Little of the early buildings survived the fall of the Tang and later dynasties; the mosque was rebuilt in the Yuan period and given essentially its present form in 1392, under the Ming emperor Hongwu, with further additions such as the front gate under the Qing. Stone tablets set up in 1606 and 1768 record imperial support for repairs. In the 20th century the complex was protected first at provincial level in 1956 and then as a major national heritage site in 1988.

Arabic and Chinese writing appear side by side throughout. Inscriptions in the Sini style render Arabic letters with the Chinese brush, steles in the courtyards carry calligraphy and records of restoration, and the wooden walls of the prayer hall are carved with passages of the Quran in both Arabic and Chinese. In the third courtyard stands the Shengxin Lou, the "Tower for Examining the Heart", a three-storey octagonal pagoda that some scholars think once served as the minaret. Further on, the hexagonal Phoenix Pavilion stands before the prayer hall, which can hold more than a thousand people. The mosque remains an active place of worship for the Hui community, in the eastern part of Xi'an's Muslim Quarter. It is one of the largest premodern mosques in China and a rare example of Islamic worship expressed wholly in Chinese architectural forms.

Getting there

The mosque is on Huajue Lane in the Muslim Quarter of central Xi'an, about 1 km from the city centre. The nearest airport is Xi'an Xianyang International Airport (XIY), about 25 km away.