Morning — at a licensed clinic in the old city
The appointment is at a licensed traditional Chinese medicine clinic inside the Ming city wall, with a practitioner registered in China. The consultation follows the classical form - pulse at three positions on each wrist, examination of the tongue, then a long set of questions about sleep, appetite, digestion and temperature - and ends with a body-constitution assessment set out as a description of a pattern rather than a diagnosis of an illness. Xi'an is a dry, cold-winter city, and the line of questioning often turns on dryness and cold in a way that will sound familiar to anyone who has spent a winter here.
Late morning — one session, and a pharmacy
You have one treatment session - acupuncture, moxibustion, tuina or cupping, chosen when you booked. Needles at a licensed clinic are sterile and used once. After the session, the practitioner will show you the dispensary, where the traditional pharmacy is a wall of small drawers rather than a shelf of bottles: dried roots, bark, flowers, seeds, dates and fungi, weighed out on a brass balance and packed for boiling or for steeping. Some guests like to watch a herbal paste - a gaofang - being prepared in the winter months; it is a slow process of boiling down a decoction with honey or sugar to a thick syrup, and it is done only on request. If you buy any dried herbs or teas to take home, check them against your own medication with your doctor before using them.
Lunch
Lunch nearby on mild Shaanxi dishes: sour soup dumplings, steamed vegetable dumplings, cold noodles dressed with sesame and vinegar, and a clear mutton broth with radish. Ask for the chilli oil on the side, which is how it is normally served anyway, and the meal will be light enough to carry you through an afternoon of walking. If you would rather eat after the market than before it, your guide will reverse the order. The restaurant is a few minutes' walk from the clinic, and the same street has an old teahouse where you can sit for half an hour before the market lanes fill up in the late afternoon.
Afternoon — the Muslim quarter at a slow pace
The Hui quarter around Beiyuanmen has stood outside the walled city's government offices since the Tang and has been trading in herbs, spices and dried goods for centuries, and the lanes still do an enormous amount of exactly that. Walk the market street for its stalls - cumin, Sichuan pepper, dried chillies, jujube, walnut, dried apricot, rose buds, cinnamon bark - and continue to the Great Mosque in Huajue Lane, founded in 742 and rebuilt in the Ming as a series of Chinese courtyards with carved wooden gateways and steles in Arabic and Chinese. It is a working place of worship; keep voices down and dress modestly. Distances here are short and the walking is level, with the vehicle meeting you at the western gate of the city wall.
Evening — dinner and rest
Dinner on simple Shaanxi food, then back to the hotel. If you would like an evening out, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda square north of the city centre has a fountain and light show that runs on a published schedule and involves almost no walking at all. The hotel can also arrange a light room-service meal if you would rather not go out; after a treatment session that is a perfectly reasonable choice. The light show on the pagoda square is a twenty-minute drive from the old city, and your guide will check the night's schedule on the day, since it is cancelled in high wind or heavy rain.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
In Xi'an.
