5-Day Xi'an Theatre Tour: Song of Everlasting Sorrow on Stage

Morning/Afternoon — Arrival & Transfer
Upon your arrival at Xi'an Xianyang International Airport (XIY) or Xi'an North Railway Station, your guide and driver will greet you at the arrival hall with a name sign. You will be comfortably transferred to the Sofitel Xian on Renmin Square for check-in; guests book their own hotels for accommodation in Xi'an, and your guide will assist with the process.

Evening — Tang Dynasty Dinner & Show
Leave the hotel at 17:45 for the Tang Dynasty Dinner & Show. You will enjoy a dinner in the Tang banquet style before the performance, which runs from 18:00 to 20:40. The production recreates the music, dance, and courtly spectacle of China's Tang dynasty, one of the most cosmopolitan eras in Chinese history.

Meals
Breakfast at the hotel; lunch at your leisure; a Tang banquet dinner with the show.

Accommodation
Check in at the Sofitel Xian on Renmin Square (guests arrange their own hotels in Xi'an).

Important - the season
The performance at Huaqing Palace is an open-air production staged against the mountainside and it runs from April to October. From November to March the show is not performed and the theatre is dark; in those months this itinerary is replaced by an evening tour of the palace, its excavated Tang baths and its illuminated courtyards, together with an indoor show in the city, and the price is adjusted accordingly. Please tell us your dates at the time of booking so that the correct version is confirmed. Note also that the production can be cancelled at short notice in heavy rain, in which case the palace tour runs as planned and the ticket is refunded or substituted - your guide will confirm on the day.

Late afternoon - Huaqing Palace
The palace sits at the foot of Mount Li, thirty-five kilometres east of Xi'an, on hot springs that have been used since the Zhou. Under the Tang it became the Huaqing Palace, the winter bathing retreat of the court, and it is inseparable from the emperor Xuanzong and his consort Yang Yuhuan, who came here through the 740s and 750s. The excavated bathing pools are on show under cover: the Lotus Pool built for the emperor, the smaller Crabapple Pool associated with Yang Guifei, and the Star and Imperial Kitchen pools around them, tiled and plumbed with stone channels that still read clearly. The site museum sets out the Tang layout, the pear garden where the court music academy was established, and the Hall of Long Life, the building in which the story's vow is set.

Dinner in Lintong
Dinner is at a district restaurant before the performance, on Lintong cooking rather than hotel food: a local chicken dish cooked with dried chilli and potato, stone-baked bread, greens from the mountain, cold noodles and a bowl of soup, with the district's pomegranate juice in season. The show starts at dusk, the theatre is a short drive from the table, and the timing is arranged so that nobody is hurrying over the last course. If you would rather eat after the performance the guide can book a later table in the city instead, though most people find that a meal before the curtain and a quiet drive back is the better arrangement.

Evening - the performance
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is an outdoor production staged on the slope behind the palace, and it takes its text from Bai Juyi's poem of 806, the hundred and twenty lines that turned a political crisis into the best-known love story in Chinese literature. The mountain is used as the backdrop and the stage machinery is worked into it: dancers appear on the hillside above the audience, water and fire are used on the stage, and the orchestral score carries the story from the court at Chang'an to the flight west and the afterlife. It is a large, unapologetically theatrical production, closer to an arena opera than to a museum piece, and it lasts a little over an hour.

Cultural Insight - why this story, on this hill
Bai Juyi wrote the poem in 806, fifty years after the events, at a moment when the dynasty was trying to explain to itself how the An Lushan rebellion of 755 had nearly ended it. The poem's subject is the fall of a state and the private grief that stands for it, and it became the version of the story that everyone in China knows - in opera, in film and now in this production. The reason it is performed here is that this is the place the story actually walked through: the springs, the halls, the slope. Reading the last lines in front of the hill, with the lights on the palace behind you, is a different experience from reading them in a book, and that is the whole case for the evening.

Meals
Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Afternoon - the craft
Shaanxi shadow puppetry has its workshops in the counties east of Xi'an, at Huaxian and Huayin, and the figures are cut from oxhide rather than paper. The leather is scraped, softened, drawn and pierced with a set of small knives, then dyed with transparent colours, pressed flat and joined at the shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips and knees with thread so the figure can be worked on three rods. A single character needs a set of interchangeable heads, kept in a wooden case like a book. At the workshop you will pierce and colour a figure yourself, assemble the joints and fit the rods, and try it against a lit screen - which is the moment most people realise how much wrist control the art actually needs.

Afternoon - the music that goes with it
Shadow play in Shaanxi is played with two local styles. Wanwan tune, named for the small brass bowl struck as a bell, is the one most often heard in the theatre, and Laoqiang - the 'old tune' of Huayin, a raw shouted style sung over a small ensemble - is the other. In both cases one singer voices every character, backed by a sanxian, a yueqin, a banhu fiddle and percussion, and the man working the rods is often also the man singing. The screen is a cloth of about a square metre lit from behind by a lamp, and the audience sits on the lit side; a troupe of six once played a village temple fair for a whole night.

Late afternoon - the performance
The programme at the small theatre is a mixed one. It opens with a shadow-play excerpt - a comic piece or a battle scene from a familiar story - then moves to rod puppets (zhangtou mu'ou) and string puppets, worked in full view of the audience, which is part of the pleasure: you watch the puppeteers' arms as much as the stage. The best-known venue of this kind in the city is the Ming courtyard house on Beiyuanmen, where performances run daily in a small hall; the guide will confirm the day's programme and substitute a theatre or a longer version if you want one.

Cultural Insight - why the screen survives
Shadow puppetry was the village cinema of the Guanzhong plain, and television took its audience away almost completely; by the 1990s most of the Huaxian troupes had stopped performing. The revival since then has been driven by the national intangible-heritage list of 2006, the UNESCO listing of Chinese shadow puppetry in 2011, and paying audiences in cities like Xi'an and at overseas festivals. The carving workshops, though, still live on commissioned work rather than on village performances, which means that watching a show and buying a figure are not tourist formalities here - they are what keeps the knives sharp and the old repertoire in the hands of people who can still sing it.

Practical notes
The workshop element is suitable for adults and for children over about eight; earlier start times can be arranged for families, and the carving can be simplified for younger hands. Dinner afterwards is in the Muslim Quarter, a few minutes' walk from the workshop, or can be left out if you want an early evening. The theatre is small and the seating is unreserved, so the guide arrives early to hold places. Guests who become interested in the craft should ask the guide about the Huaxian workshops, which can be visited on a day trip east of the city.

Meals
Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Late afternoon - the south gate and the barbican
Yongning Gate is the south gate of the Ming wall, built with the rest of the circuit between 1370 and 1378, and it is the most elaborate of the four main gates. What you walk through on the way in is a defensive sequence rather than a gate: across the moat to the sluice tower, then into a crescent-shaped outer enceinte, then into the enclosed barbican in front of the main gate tower. An attacker who forced the first door was sealed inside that courtyard with fire from the walls on three sides. The arrow tower above carries its rows of loopholes, and the gate tower behind it holds the drums used at the opening and closing of the city.

Dinner near the gate
Dinner is at a restaurant in the streets inside the South Gate, close to Shuyuanmen and the old Confucian temple quarter, so that the walk to the ceremony afterwards is short. The menu is the ordinary Xi'an one - cold noodles with sesame and vinegar, dumplings, a wheat dish or two, braised pork and a soup - and the tables are booked early enough that there is no pressure to hurry. If you would rather eat after the ceremony, the guide can hold a later table and the walk on the wall can be moved ahead of the meal instead; the order of the evening is flexible and depends on the ceremony's published time on your date.

Evening - the welcome ceremony
The Tang-style welcome ceremony at Yongning Gate is a costumed gate-opening ritual: ceremonial guards in Tang armour, drumming, banners and officials of the reception bureau playing out the arrival of guests at the imperial city. It runs fifteen to twenty minutes and is staged at published times, most reliably in the evening and on weekends during the season, and it is staged inside the barbican, which puts the audience between the walls of the old defence. Two practical warnings: the schedule changes by season and by month, and the ceremony is suspended in bad weather, so your guide confirms the timing the day before and reshuffles the evening if it has been cancelled. Photography from the ramparts above is allowed and gives the best angle.

Evening - the lit wall
The wall is illuminated every night, and the ramparts, watchtowers and gate towers carry projection lighting of their own. In the cold months, roughly from the Lunar New Year period into February, the wall also holds its Spring Festival lantern fair, which has run for more than three decades and fills the southern ramparts with large illuminated set pieces; it is one of the biggest lantern displays in the country and worth arranging a trip around if your dates are flexible. Your walk along the top afterwards, with the moat and the ring park below and the traffic of the modern city beyond, is about a kilometre and takes half an hour at an unhurried pace.

Cultural Insight - reading the wall as a system
The circuit is 13.74 kilometres long, 12 metres high, 12 to 14 metres wide at the top and 15 to 18 metres thick at the base, with a watchtower roughly every 120 metres and close to six thousand crenellated battlements along the outer edge. It was built in the Ming on the line of the Tang imperial city, has been repaired repeatedly since, and is now used as public space - the top carries bicycles by day and an international marathon that has been run since 1993. The lighting is the newest layer on a structure that has been rebuilt more than once, which is a reasonable thing to keep in mind while you look at it.

Meals
Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning — Huajue Lane and the Great Mosque
Visit the Great Mosque on Huajue Lane, one of the largest and best preserved mosques in China. Founded in the Tang dynasty, it sets Arabic script and Chinese timber architecture side by side in the same courtyards, a record of more than a thousand years of Islamic life in Chang'an.

Afternoon — Shopping
Free time for last-minute shopping: cured beef, sweet fermented rice wine, date cake, hand-cut paper-cuts and calligraphy. Your guide can point you to shops the city itself buys from.

Evening — Departure
Your private transfer takes you to Xi'an Xianyang International Airport for your onward flight.

Meals
Breakfast included.