The Xi'an that visitors see is the Ming city, built on the site of the Tang imperial city, and the Tang capital in turn was roughly six times the size of the walled grid that survives. Long before either, the capital of the Western Han stood a few kilometres to the north-west, in open ground beyond the present ring road, and its principal palace is still there as a series of earth platforms in the fields. The site is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Silk Road corridor, and it is almost always empty.
What is left
Chang'an, the Han capital, was founded at the beginning of the second century BC and remained the seat of government for roughly two hundred years of the Western Han, and afterwards as a secondary capital. Its walls enclosed a large rectangle, and at the centre of the south-western quadrant stood the Weiyang Palace, the main audience and residential complex of the emperors. What survives above ground is the tamped-earth foundation platform of the front hall, still several metres high and several hundred metres across, with the platforms of other halls, walls, terraces and drains traceable in the surrounding fields. There are no buildings up, no reconstructed halls and no crowds - just a vast, flat site with a grassy platform in the middle of it and explanatory boards in Chinese and English.
Why it matters
The Weiyang Palace is where the political history of the early Han took place, and it gave its name to a whole tradition of Chinese poetry about vanished glory - a phrase about the moon over Weiyang appears in verse for the next thousand years. Archaeologically the site matters even more: it preserves, at ground level, the plan of an imperial palace of the second century BC, including gates, courtyards, official bureaus and drainage, at a scale and completeness that few ancient capitals anywhere can match.
Practical notes
The site is in the north-western suburbs, reachable by taxi or by metro plus a short walk, and there is no admission charge; the area is partly parkland and partly working farmland. There is very little shade and no facilities on the platform itself, so bring water and go early or late. Allow two hours if you want to walk the extent of the remains. Combine the visit with the Western Han imperial tombs further out along the same axis, or with the city wall on the way back, since the wall's north-western corner faces the road out to the site.
