Zhouzhi County (周至县)
2,975 km² · Area 2019
Zhouzhi County (周至县, Zhōuzhì Xiàn) is the largest of Xi'an's thirteen administrative divisions and the furthest south-west of them — and it is a county, 县, not a district, one of only two such units in a city otherwise made of eleven 区. It joined Xi'an in October 1983, transferred in from Xianyang prefecture (咸阳地区).
It covers about 2,975 km² on 2019-era aggregator data that we have not yet confirmed against an official source, and its government seat is at Erqu Subdistrict (二曲街道) in the north of the county. The county is agricultural, and what it is known for nationally is 猕猴桃 (kiwifruit) — the orchards south and east of the seat are what you actually drive through on the way in.
The parts a visitor wants are in the north, in the Qinling foothills: Louguantai (楼观台), the Daoist complex where Laozi is said to have taught, and the Qinling Four Treasures panda park a few minutes away from it, home to Qizai, the only brown panda in captivity. Zhouzhi is also where the G5 Xi'an–Kunming motorway stops running inside Shaanxi: its exit at the county's northern edge is the last one before the road continues on into Sichuan.
What it is actually like
Zhouzhi is huge, and almost everything worth a visitor's time sits in one corner of it, an hour or more from the county seat. Plan it as a drive out and back from the city, not as a stop on the way to somewhere else.
The Louguantai corner is the part with signage: the Daoist complex, the panda park beside it, ginkgoes in late October and November that make the queue long, and the mountain road under the Zhongnan. Two things to check before you set out — the panda park sells tickets online only, and it closes on Mondays.
Two honest notes. First, the county seat, 二曲 (Erqu), is administrative: it exists because the government is here, not because there is anything to see. Second, the motorway is the county's high street and it can be more than you expect — trucks, fruit lorries, and long empty stretches with the Qinling on one side and flat plain on the other. The kiwifruit in season is genuinely worth stopping for if you are driving through in autumn, and it is sold at the roadside rather than in shops.
The Hei toll station (黑收费站) at that last exit was where motorway tolls used to end; China's national expressways stopped tolling in January 2020, so nothing stops your car there now.
Where to sleep: in the city — see our where to stay guide — unless you are local.
It is a 县, and that is not a detail
Xi'an has eleven districts (区) and two counties (县). Lantian and Zhouzhi are the counties, and the difference is real rather than cosmetic.
A 区 is an urban division. Its seat is a built-up city district with the usual apparatus — metro, ring road, dense street grid, an address you will see on a taxi receipt. A 县 is the older unit. Its seat is a county town (县城), its territory is overwhelmingly farmland and mountain, and its area figures are an order of magnitude larger because they take in all the countryside. Zhouzhi's seat, 二曲 (Erqu), is small by any metropolitan standard, while the county's boundaries reach across the Qinling foothills.
What that means for a traveller is mostly practical. A 县 on a city map is not a neighbourhood of the city — it is a separate countryside destination, often two hours each way by road. It also means the map scale hides distance: a county seat that looks adjacent to a district can be a full afternoon's drive away, and a county that looks small next to a compact urban 区 is in fact one of the largest administrative areas Xi'an has.