Top Things to Do in Xi'an

Start when the city's yeast wakes up, watch vendors slap sesame cakes onto the curved belly of a clay oven, hear chili oil sizzle as it hits hand-ripped noodles, and smell fennel pollen drifting from lamb skewers while your tuk-tuk driver guns the engine around a donkey cart. By 9 a.m. you'll have knocked back eight breakfast staples, ending with a paper cup of pomegranate juice whose crimson seeds glisten like wet rubies.

Stand over Pit 1's trench as your guide points to a general whose stone armor still bears flecks of vermilion, then lift your eyes to the metallic echo of tourists above, a sound that mimics the original infantry clatter. The add-ons, often Hanyangling's underground glass walkway or the 1,300-year-old Big Wild Goose Pagoda, let you sandwich Han jade burial suits beside Tang sutra tablets in one narrative arc.

In eight tightly choreographed hours you'll pedal the City Wall's shadowed crenellations, descend into the Great Mosque where cedar incense snakes around Ming pillars, and face a Tang dynasty concubine's mirror whose bronze surface once reflected rouged cheeks. A vehicle waits at each stop so you can leave the crowded souvenir lane the moment saffron-robed monks exit the Buddhist nunnery, their wooden clogs clip-clopping on slate.

Morning at the pits, afternoon on the 14-km ramparts, evening elbow-to-elbow on Beiyuanmen lane, this trio lets you smell dust from 2,000-year-old clay at dawn and cumin from 12-century Silk-Road grills after dark. The guide times the wall circuit so you freewheel downhill while the drum tower's giant cowhide face booms 5 p.m. across the eaves.

Step past the arrivals ribbon into cool terminal air that smells of instant noodles and floor disinfectant, then spot a driver holding a placard inked with your surname in both scripts. Forty minutes later you roll beneath the South Gate's tunnel, bricks lit amber like a movie set, while the driver explains which lane near your hotel serves roujiamo flatbread until 2 a.m.

Day one you photograph warriors whose eyebrows still carry indigo pigment flecks. Day two you grind your own wheat flour in a village courtyard, forearms dusted white while a millstone groans like an old man. Between the two you'll sleep inside the old rectangle of walls, lulled by cicadas whose pitch hasn't changed since Ming masons laid the final brick.

Spend the extra dawn watching calligraphers dip wolf-hair brushes in a lotus pond outside Small Wild Goose Pagoda, water rings spreading like parchment fibers. By night three you'll be seated on a 30-cm stool in a Daoist quarter courtyard, slurping fermented glutinous rice wine whose sourness pricks the tongue while the host recounts how Tang emperors drank the same brew before battle.

After you exit the pits, the bus deposits you at a palace-style theatre whose lobby reeks of sandalwood aerosol and whose stage is framed by a 20-metre silk scroll. Over 14 courses, pomegranate duck, date-paste dumplings, you watch dancers twirl sleeves that snap like wet flags, the same hue as the mineral pigments once painted on the clay soldiers you just met.

Your driver doubles as taster-in-chief, handing you a lamb-brisket flatbread whose juice dribbles onto your wrist while he explains why Hui Muslims add cumin heavier than Sichuan would dare. Between stops he guns the motor past evening shoppers, neon reflecting in puddles that smell of soy and gutter water, a combination oddly comforting.

Eight travelers maximum means you can hear the guide's whisper that Pit 3 was the command headquarters, its charioteers missing bronze reins because looters yanked them first. The van's glass roof lets loess plateau sunlight pour over you as you approach, the same light that baked the warriors for two millennia.