The guide the City of Time deserves
Xi'an is the root of China — the plain where the first unified empire was born, where the Han gave a people their name, and where the Tang built the largest city on Earth. It has watched thirty centuries pass without an official-quality English website. We built the one it deserves.
Written and maintained by the VisitXian editorial team — on the ground in Xi'an, with facts re-verified on a rolling schedule.
Why this site exists
Xi'an is not a normal destination. It's the root of China — the plain where the Qin forged the first unified empire in 221 BC, where the Han gave their name to a people, and where the Tang built what was briefly the largest city on Earth. It's the eastern end of the Silk Road, the capital of thirteen dynasties, the one place on Earth where a 2,200-year-old army still stands guard forty minutes from a bubble tea shop. And if you've planned a trip here, you've done the dance: a content farm tells you the Terracotta Army is "a must-see for any traveler," a blog from 2019 says you can buy tickets at the gate (you can't), and a forum thread contradicts both about whether your credit card works. China's entry rules, payment systems and booking requirements now change faster than the content about them.
VisitXian is the fix: a complete guide to the City of Time — every layer of it, from Deep Time to Current Time — written to the standard of an official tourism site, by people who know the city, and kept current by a re-verification system instead of good intentions.
What makes us different
- Written from the ground, not scraped. Every guide comes from on-the-ground knowledge of the city, and we update pages when rules change.
- Practical precision. Exact metro exits, Chinese addresses to show a driver, real prices in yuan with dollar and euro equivalents, booking lead times.
- Honest verdicts. We tell you when something is overpriced, overrated or skippable.
How we work
Every page goes through research, drafting, a separate fact-check pass, and an edit before publication — then enters a re-verification queue that resurfaces it on a fixed cadence. Reader corrections feed the same queue. The full process is public on our editorial policy page.
The team behind the guide
Five editors, each owning one part of the city — and each named on the pages they verify.
Xan Dusta
Metro & Transport Editor
Has ridden every line of the Xi'an Metro end to end — twice. Writes the station guides, first/last-train tables, airport-transfer and high-speed-rail pages from repeated rush-hour fieldwork, not desk research.
Xiaonan Cui
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Built VisitXian — the honest English guide this city lacked — after a decade in China split between resident and visitor shoes. Sets the editorial standard: every fact verified, every price confirmed on the ground, no filler.
Lynette Lee
Food & Restaurants Editor
Eats the menu so you don't have to. Tracks which paomo kitchen still hand-tears its bread, which roujiamo queue is actually worth joining, and which 'famous' night-market stall locals quietly skip.
Andy Tsui
Practical Guides Editor
The logistics person: tested Alipay with four different foreign cards, timed the metro-to-hotel walks with luggage, and knows which Bell Tower front desk speaks English at 2am.
Nann Xu
Culture & Stories Editor
Writes the city's layers — from the Tang grid beneath the streets to the Ming walls built on top of it. Reads the steles, walks the lanes, then writes what the buildings actually say.
Corrections welcome
Xi'an changes fast. If something on any page is out of date, tell us — fixing it is how this site stays worth reading.