Walking the Xian City Wall

About the Author:

Keith Jones is the founder of Baja Jones Adventures, Jones Adventures, Tigress Tours in Thailand and Butanding Tours in the Philippine Islands and has led thousands of people to Mexico and other interesting locations around the world. He specializes in gray whale tour, blue whale tour, gray and blue whale combo tour, giant panda bear tour, walk a tiger tour, shark tour, African safari tour, African gorilla trek, arctic narwhal tour and Magdalena Bay whale watching tour. He also writes about Baja travel and gray whales. Keith Jones is the author of Gray Whales My Twenty Years of Discovery.

I walk the City Wall during an all-day rainstorm, exploring and eventually growing bored on the oldest and best preserved City Wall in China.

Walking around the City Wall of Xian

Trip Log Xian, Shaanxi Province, China

July 24,

I arrived in Xian yesterday afternoon. The sky was cloudy and a light rain had fallen earlier that morning, even so the temperature was warm at around 30 C. or perhaps 85 degrees F. There had been some light rain during the day. This weather was cooler than expected. As we were driving to our hotel in the Center of the City of Xian, I was talking about the City of Xian and I mentioned to the group that the City Wall of Xian is the longest and best preserved city wall in China.

That’s when I decided my mini-adventure for the next day would be to walk all around the city wall. This city wall stands 12 meters high (just over 36 feet). It varies from 12 to 15 meters in thickness. The total length of the wall is 13.7 kilometers or about 8 miles.

I woke this morning, looked down from the 7th floor window of the Skytel Hotel and saw a sea of bobbing multi-colored umbrellas moving past the hotel. Rain! So much for a nice easy stroll around the city wall… There was a rhythm to the umbrella movement that was fascinating to watch. Almost like the currents and eddys of a slow moving river, I could follow the ebb and flow of the pedestrians hurrying to work on the sidewalks 100 feet below me.

But I was not to be put off by Grandfather Earth and his shenanigans. (You may remember that my last adventure included a brief stop at the roadside shrine where local Yaan folks speak short messages and small prayers to Tu Di Gong Gong.) I decided a little rain would not stop me from walking the city wall.

At 10:00 AM I left the hotel. I was wearing virtually the same walking outfit as when I walked a couple days ago from Bifengxia to Yaan except, I had on a light gray T-shirt rather than the bright red shirt and green instead of brown cargo shorts.

The hotel offered to lend me an umbrella, but I wanted to be able to just throw it or give it away if the rain stopped and I didn’t need to carry it. The South Gate is only a half kilometer from the hotel. I walked in that direction, stopping to purchase a light faded blue 10 Y ($1.50 US) collapsing umbrella at a street side newspaper vendor’s stall.

A light rain was falling. I was damp, but not really soaking wet. I approached the ticket booth and paid my 40 Yuan admission fee. This fee is good for one entrance only. If I were to leave the top of the wall and come down to the street level, then to return it would be another 40 Yuan.

A pair of steep stone stairways lead up to the top of the wall at the South Gate. I followed behind two Chinese tourist couples. The men walked ahead of the women. The two men wore business suits with white long sleeve dress shirts, modern patterned ties and shiny, recently polished, black leather dress shoes. The women were wearing expensive dresses and high heeled shoes that I thought might have been Manolo Blahniks. One was wearing jungle green stilts that looked like MB’s style Deci and the other had a less expensive pair of MB Lucy – Neo’s in Bright Yellow.

From the way these four were dressed I would say those shoes were not knock offs, but originals. Chinese professionals seldom if ever buy knock offs, but rather they like to sport the expensive original brands. The stilt like heels teetered and slid around on the uneven stone surface of the stairway. Those women were in danger of falling off the unprotected edge of the stairway. They held hands to steady one another as they stepped delicately up onto the top of the wall.

There to greet us as we stood on top of the wall was a vendor selling water and snacks beneath a canvas covered canopy. Like every Chinese tourist venue, this city wall had souvenir stands. This stand was manned (womaned?) by 3 bored looking girls, ages probably between 18 and 25. They had no customers and looked at the five of us hopefully.

The two Chinese couples began taking photos of one another as soon as they were up on top of the wall, while I stood there with a light rain dripping from my umbrella and debated with myself in which direction to travel. I finally let the wind and rain decide for me. I turned so the wind was blowing from behind me and with the rain striking only the back of my bare calves, I walked in a westerly direction.

The Xian City Wall has rampart projections that extend perpendicular to the wall and out away from the wall. These ramparts are spaced 120 meters apart all along the wall. Why 120 meters between them? Because half of that length (60 meters) is the distance that Ming Dynasty archers of the 14th century could shoot an arrow with accuracy. A squad of archers constantly manned each of the 98 ramparts. Should an enemy attempt to attack the wall, a barrage of arrows could be let loose on every square foot of the exterior face of the wall.

The individual quarried stones are grayish brown granite that has weathered the years with hardly a sign of aging. The pavers are nicely set, but I suspect all of the paving was removed, cleaned and then reset, because the walking surface is smooth and easy to use.

The original city wall was built more than 2,000 years ago; renovations and additions began during the Tang Dynasty around 600 AD. During the Ming Dynasty the wall was enlarged to the current size and shape beginning around 1375 AD. More recently the City administrators decided in 1983 to do another restoration of the wall, which included a massive landscaping

project around the outside of the wall.

Now those 98 archers ramparts have been converted to vending stalls. Yes, they look like the stone ramparts of old, but inside where archers once slept and where bows and arrows once sat in racks waiting for an invader to approach, are now nestled various businesses. Bicycle rental shops, snack shops and even some restaurants are housed within the stone buildings.

But for me, the top of the wall was amazingly lonesome. Those two couples shot a dozen photos, then walked back down the stairs. As I walked west, I realized that I was the only tourist on top of the wall. Occasionally a solitary worker wearing a thin plastic raincoat would pass me.

Did I mention that the rain never did stop while I was out walking? All day I carried the umbrella in my left hand. Now and then I would stop, pull the small digital camera from my right pocket and take a snapshot or two. Then I would walk again.

I kept this boring pace around the top of the wall for about one hour. When I arrived at the West Gate I couldn’t take it anymore and decided I needed to get down on the street where I could find some people to talk to. After all, you all know that I HATE TO HIKE. I just do these long walks to see new sights and strange places. I walk to have the opportunity to talk to some local people, not drive past them at 100 kilometers an hour.

Coming down from the wall was the best decision I made all day. As I got to the bottom of the wall, the raindrops got larger and the wind blew faster. Instead of just my bare calves being wet, now the shorts were getting rained on. I couldn’t find a good angle to hold the umbrella to keep the rain away. A 10 Yuan umbrella isn’t such good quality and every time a strong gust of wind blew, the umbrella would collapse to an inverted funnel shape. The heavy rain soon had me quite wet.

Thankfully at the bottom of the wall, across the busy street, there was a small tea shop waiting it seemed, just for me. I stepped inside, wet and bedraggled. The quick drying hi-tech fabric T-shirt was thoroughly soaked with rain water. The heavy cotton denim like cargo shorts were waterlogged. My Columbia Birke hiking shoes are waterproof and so my feet were dry, but the low top socks were wet and cold around my ankles.

The tea shop had no air conditioning, for which I was thankful. A smiling and stylishly made up tea server, wearing a muted beige cheongsam accented with painted pink cherry blossoms, brought me a menu, then she stood beside my table smiling while I looked at the incomprehensible menu, written only in Mandarin.

For those of you who don’t know what a cheongsam is, let me describe this dress. Developed originally by Manchu nationals as attire for both men and women, the qipao (pronounced cheepow) as it was called in the 17th century, was transformed during the qing dynasty into a tighter fitting, sexier dress. Then in the flapper period of the 1920s the dress style transitioned to the current form, with a sinuously tight fit and a long slit up the side to expose the woman’s thigh as she walked. The dress became well known to the Western World because of the movie, The World of Suzie Wong. Now the cheongam is most commonly worn by waitresses and tea servers.

Anyway, after I stared blankly at the menu for a couple minutes I wised up, stood up and walked to the rear of the shop where the various tea leaves are stored in jars and bins. The serving girl followed me, her cheongsam flashing brief views of her shapely leg from within the confines of the form hugging dress.

I studied the tea leaves and eventually pointed to a particularly dark green leafy variety. She understood and with a smile began to brew me a pot of that nice green tea. I relaxed in the tea shop for 30 minutes while outside the heavy rain slowed to a light drizzle. That was my cue to start walking again.

Paying 25 Yuan (about $4) for the pot of tea, I continued my walk, now heading north along the wall. I was now on the inside of the City Wall. While sipping tea I had decided that to fulfill my goal for the day, I would walk on the city streets parallel to the wall, but that I must try to keep the wall in sight most of the time. This would, in my mind, count as having walked around the City Wall of Xian. Life should not be boring, but up on top of the wall, even with the wind gusting to about 25 mph and rain keeping me soaked to the skin, everything was endlessly repeated over and over. The parapet and crenellations continuing all along the wall had soon just emphasized how boring a solitary walk on a rain swept wall can become. The expected throngs of Chinese tourists that add interest to my China walks had all stayed inside on this rain swept day.

Now walking along beside the wall, I tried to keep to the most interesting streets. Sometimes I would lose sight of the wall for a block or two. When that happened, I would simply turn left at the next cross street and walk until I found the wall again. Because I was walking around the city wall in a clockwise fashion, it was easy to keep track of where the wall was, by just turning left if I lost sight of the wall.

At 1:30 PM I arrived back at the South Gate. Still, I wasn’t finished walking. I had more energy to burn, so I took the main road leading from the South Gate north to the Bell Tower, about 1 kilometer away. There in the Bell Tower Square I rewarded myself with a Starbuck’s coffee break. The large drink (Venti size even in China) that I ordered cost 35 Yuan ($5.25 US)!

The inside of this Starbuck’s is cool and dry. I found a soft comfortable chair and settled into the plush cushion. Sipping hot mocha I contemplated the foot massage that I planned to indulge in later. Life is interesting, wet or dry. As the Johnnie Walker whiskey ads here in Asia say “Just keep walking”!

The End

Keith Jones

Writing from Xian, China

July 24, 2010