Hanyangling & Hidden Xi’an

The day

What This Day Feels Like

Forty minutes north of the city, the Han emperor Jingdi lies surrounded by an afterlife army utterly unlike the First Emperor’s — thousands of serene, third-scale figures with gentle smiles, buried with wooden arms and silk robes that time has stripped away. You view them through glass: walkways run directly over the excavated pits, and on quiet days you’ll have the underground halls nearly to yourself.

The rest of the day stays off the checklist: the tilted, earthquake-cracked Small Wild Goose Pagoda in its garden, the brush-and-ink shops of Shuyuanmen calligraphy street under the city wall, and Yongxingfang’s Shaanxi food court, where drinking rice wine from a bowl and smashing it is not vandalism but tradition.

Good to know

Before You Go

• Hanyangling is the connoisseur’s site — archaeologists often rate it above the main army
• The underground museum is dim by design; allow your eyes a minute to adjust
• Shuyuanmen shops will carve a stone seal with your name in Chinese while you wait
• Bowl-smashing wine at Yongxingfang: one bowl, one wish, one satisfying crash