An athlete shows his dragon-pattern medal of 2016 Xi’an City Wall International Marathon on the fortifications of Xi’an. On Nov.5, this marathon competition kicked off. The race was first held in 1993 and more than 60,000 domestic and international runners have participated. The race naturally integrates traditional fortifications with modern life.

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“Thousands of households look like a chessboard, and twelve streets resemble vegetable plots.”

This line comes from Tang poet Bai Juyi’s poem Looking at the City on Guanyin Platform, which describes the layout of the city of Chang’an in the Tang Dynasty, today known as Xi’an, Shaanxi Province.

Bai’s work emphasized the layout of Chang’an, both inside and outside the city walls.
The city walls, trees, rivers, lanes, gate towers and turrets are all connected in these works, eliciting impressions of a panoramic scroll.

Today, Xi’an’s fortifications have inherited their shape from the Chang’an city walls and reflect an unsophisticated but fascinating charm.

Xi’an’s city walls were initially built based on the layout of Daxing City, designed and constructed by Yu Wenkai, an ancient expert on urban planning and architecture, in the early Sui Dynasty. Shi Hongshuai, a research fellow of the Northwest Institute of Historical Environment and Socioeconomic Development at Shaanxi Normal University, said that Daxing City had a vast scale and compact structure. In addition to the outer city walls, there were interior walls surrounding the palace city and the imperial city.

The palace city refers to the royal palace where members of the royal family lived and were surrounded by fortifications, and the imperial city is the area between the capital city and the palace city, surrounded by city walls and independent city gates. The layout of Daxing City finally resembled “a city inside another city.” After the founding of the Tang Dynasty, Daxing City was renamed Chang’an City, which was expanded and constructed on the basis of the previous scale and layout.

Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, archaeologists ascertained the range and location of the outer city of Chang’an City. The imperial city and palace city of Chang’an City are located at the northern area of what was previously known as Daxing City. Because the city walls of these two cities were firm and solid, there were no cases of large-scale redesign during the Sui and Tang dynasties.

Archaeologists determined that the concrete outer city walls were made of rammed earth, and the overall length is nearly 33 kilometers. There is no doubt that this was an unprecedented and magnificent project 1,300 years ago. But after the Tang Dynasty, Chang’an lost its position as a capital city and economic center. Following that, the glory of the Chang’an city walls was diminished.

Xi’an’s fortifications were built on the foundations of the Tang Dynasty’s Chang’an imperial city in the early Ming Dynasty. The continuous repair of the Xi’an city walls in later generations created its modern style. Zhang Yonglu, a history professor at Northwest University, said that Bi Yuan, the Shaanxi provincial governor of the Qing Dynasty, gave orders to mend Xi’an’s fortifications, which played a significant role in its long-term preservation.

In 1983, the Xi’an municipal government mended demolished city gates, watchtowers, sluice gate towers and drawbridges, and built up a city wall park, attracting millions of visitors.
Nowadays, the initiative of establishing the “Silk Road Economic Belt” has provided a new development opportunity for Xi’an. The “living carriers,” Xi’an fortifications, are well preserved and naturally integrated with the modern city construction in order to realize the harmony of urban development and historic relic preservation.   

Shangguan Jiqing, the mayor of Xi’an, said: “At this new stage, the protection and preservation of the Xi’an city walls needs to break through unnecessary formalities, develop urban functions and merge into the development of a modern city, realizing both economic benefits and social effects.”