6-Day Tasting Xi'an Culinary Adventure

Morning — Arrival and Check-in
Land at Xi'an Xianyang International Airport and transfer by private coach to your hotel. Check in, and pace yourself — there are six days of eating ahead.

Afternoon — At Leisure
Rest and adjust. Your guide will confirm the restaurant stops for the days to come.

Evening — Lamb Pao Mo
Dinner is the benchmark: a whole lamb slow-simmered for hours, its broth poured over the bread you have broken into thumbnail-sized pieces yourself. Served with pickled garlic and chilli paste, it is the dish Xi'an judges its own cooking by.

Meals
Breakfast, Dinner included.

Morning — The Terracotta Warriors
This is not a history lesson, it is a confrontation. Standing at the edge of Pit No. 1 looking out over thousands of clay soldiers, the scale of what one emperor ordered into production is hard to take in. Your guide covers the three pits and the Bronze Chariot hall.

Afternoon — Huaqing Palace
Continue to Huaqing Palace, where the most famous love story in Chinese history played out around natural hot springs, and where the drama of empire and the drama of a single consort are inseparable.

Evening — Sajinqiao Night Market
Dinner at the Sajinqiao night market, a working-class neighbourhood where motorbikes weave between food carts and grandmothers argue cheerfully with vendors over the price of skewers.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — The Guanzhong Noodle Workshop
Today's highlight is hands-on: under master noodle-makers you learn to pull biangbiang noodles — the wide, chewy, oil-dressed noodles that are Shaanxi's signature. The character for biang has more than fifty strokes, which tells you how seriously the province takes them.

Afternoon — The Xi'an Museum
Visit the Xi'an Museum, home to objects from every era of Chinese civilisation, with the Tang tri-colour glazed horse as its star — a piece whose copper glaze still shimmers.

Evening — Yongxingfang
Enter Yongxingfang, built to showcase Shaanxi's intangible culinary heritage. This is where you assemble your 'Three Qin set': the sacred trinity of Xi'an comfort food in one evening.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — Huajue Temple Mosque
Return to the Huajue Temple Mosque, this time going deeper. This is not a photo stop: it is a living mosque where more than a thousand Muslims pray five times a day. Built when Arab merchants settled in Tang Chang'an, it fuses Islamic function with Chinese form.

Afternoon — The Pao Mo Experience
The main event. You are handed two dense bread buns and asked to break them into thumbnail-sized pieces — twenty to thirty minutes of patient work — before the kitchen takes them away, adds broth and lamb, and returns them to you.

Evening — Miaohou Street
The night patrol on Miaohou Street, a narrow lane with no English menus and no tourist signs: families, late-shift workers and dedicated food hunters, all eating well.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — Cycling the City Wall
Rent a bicycle and ride the ancient ramparts: 14 kilometres of Ming stone with 98 watchtowers, laid over Tang foundations. Cycling the wall is one of the few ways to see the whole old city in a single morning.

Afternoon — Tang Paradise
Enter Tang Paradise, a vast recreation of the imperial gardens of the Tang. The centrepiece is Ziyun Lou, the hall where emperors once held court, surrounded by lakes, pavilions and planting on the scale the dynasty liked.

Evening — Imperial Banquet at Yu Yan Palace
Dinner inside the park at Yu Yan Palace, which specialises in reconstructed Tang dishes — research behind every recipe, names taken from Tang poetry, presentation to match.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — The Giant Wild Goose Pagoda
Visit the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, where the monk Xuanzang translated the scriptures he brought from India.

Afternoon — Culinary Souvenirs
Shopping time. Xi'an's edible souvenirs are the ones worth carrying home: la niu rou cured beef, chou jiu sweet wine, zeng gao steamed date cake, and the spice mixes of the Muslim Quarter.

Evening — Departure
Your private coach transfers you to Xi'an Xianyang International Airport for your flight home.

Meals
Breakfast included.