Day Trips from Xi'an

Mt. Huashan is an hour and a half out of Xi'an. It is a stunning holy mountain, and an escape from China's big cities. Most of the tourists there are Chinese; we saw few foreigners and we sure stood out as white females. We took the cable car up...

Want to know more about Taoism? About 70km west of Xi'an, in Tayu Village, is the Louguantai Temple, where it's said that Lao Tze, the founder of Taoism, wrote the Tao Te Ching and set the fundamentals for the religion. Built over two thousand...

About 45 minutes outside Xi'an, at the foot of Mount Lishan, is the Huaqing Hotspring (or Huaqing Chi). These grounds were the setting to the love story between Emperor Xuangzong and his concubine Yang Guifei, one of the four beauties of ancient...

In a courtyard of the Guanzhong Folk Art Museum, three men saw away on fiddles, another rocks out on a banjo-like instrument called a sanxian. Turns out lao giang, the folk music of China’s Shaanxi Province, sounds like a riff on American...

Take advantage of your time in Xi'an to really see what it was like to live like an emperor. About 27 miles outside of Xi'an is the Taiping National Forest Park. The Taiping Palace was built by an emperor in the Sui Dynasty, and the park also...

The story of the Emperor Qin reads something like Game of Thrones, with hostages, feuding brothers, wars, and the ultimate unification and creation of what we know as China today. Wanting to protect himself in the afterlife, Emperor Qin created an...

The Xi'an Banpo Museum preserves artifacts excavated from the neolithic site of Banpo, settled 5,600 to 6,700 years ago. The museum provides access to the excavated buildings and has several houses reconstructed in the style of the prehistoric...