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.
