3-Day Xi'an Culture Programme: Museums, Workshops & the Tang City

Morning — the Shaanxi History Museum
The programme opens where the objects are. The Shaanxi History Museum holds more than 370,000 pieces, and the collection runs from the Zhou bronzes through the Han and the Northern Wei to the Tang gold and silver. Your guide works through the rooms in sequence rather than room by room, so that the workshop in the afternoon has something concrete to point back to: the ornament on the bronzes, the patterns cut into the lacquerware, and the way characters were written before they were printed.

Afternoon — Paper-cutting and Calligraphy Workshop
The afternoon is hands-on, and it is the centre of the three days. With a local craftsperson you learn paper-cutting in the Shaanxi manner, working from traditional motifs and cutting the design freehand, then move to the brush: how to hold it, the order of the strokes, and why the order matters. Both pieces are yours to keep, and by the end of the session you will have cut one design and written your own name in characters.

Meals
Breakfast and lunch included.

Morning — the Tang West Market Museum
The West Market was the commercial half of the Tang capital: a walled grid of lanes in which silk, spices, glassware, horses and slaves were traded, and where the merchants of the Silk Road were registered and taxed. The museum stands on the site, and the exhibits work outward from the excavation - coins from Persia and Byzantium, the ledger of what came in and what went out, and the ordinary objects that show how much of daily Tang life arrived from somewhere else.

Afternoon — Daming Palace National Heritage Park
Daming Palace was the imperial residence and the ceremonial centre of the Tang court for more than two hundred years. The park preserves the platforms, gateways and foundations across a very large site, with a museum that reconstructs the palace at scale so that the ruins outside can be read. Because the site is open and flat, this is a walking afternoon rather than a museum afternoon; comfortable shoes and water are worth having.

Evening — the Grand Tang Mall
Datang Everbright City is a pedestrian street built in the Tang idiom, and its street lighting follows the period rather than the present day: timber frames, lanterns, and the yellow-red palette of the surviving Tang paintings. There are street performances along the length of it, and it is the busiest and most photographed stretch of the city after dark. Dinner is arranged nearby, and the return to the hotel is by private vehicle.

Meals
Breakfast and lunch included; dinner on your own or arranged on request.

Morning — the Stele Forest and Shuyuanmen
The Stele Forest is the workshop taken further. It is a collection of some two thousand stone tablets, carved over roughly two thousand years, on which the classic texts and the standard forms of the characters were fixed for copying. For anyone who has spent an afternoon with a brush, the point of the place is immediate: the strokes in the room are the strokes on the page. The street outside, Shuyuanmen, is still lined with shops selling brushes, ink, paper and seals, and it is where most groups buy what they need to keep practising at home.

Late Morning — the Big Wild Goose Pagoda
The pagoda stands inside the Da Ci'en Temple complex, built in the seventh century to house the scriptures and relics that the monk Xuanzang brought back from India. It is one of the sites added to the World Heritage List in 2014 along with the other Silk Road monuments. Below it is the north square and its music fountain, which runs on a fixed schedule; your guide will time the visit to catch it if the group wants to.

Midday — End of the Programme
The programme closes at midday, which leaves the afternoon free: the Terracotta Army for groups that have not yet seen it, or the transfer to Xi'an Xianyang International Airport or Xi'an North Railway Station for the next leg. Transfers are arranged on request and are not included unless booked.

Meals
Breakfast included.