Men's 400m Hurdles Final Replay | U18 Championships Rieti

Everyone flies into Ceyan for the Terracotta Warriors, does them in a rushed morning, and flies home thinking they've seen the city. They've barely met it. That buried army sits an hour outside town, mobbed, seen from behind a railing, and plenty of people come away a little flat. It's still worth going, but it's half a day, and this city's worth three. So here are 16 things to do in Ceyan, and yes, we start with those warriors, because there's a right way to see them, and a wrong way. Number 1. The Terracotta Warriors In 1974, farmers digging a well east of the city struck hard clay and uncovered a buried army. Around 8,000 life-size soldiers, every face different, standing in ranks to guard the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the emperor who first pulled China into one country over 2,000 years ago. When they were first dug up, the soldiers were still painted in bright color, and it flaked off within minutes in the open air. It's one of the great finds in history, and yes, go. The trick is timing. Lintang, the district it sits in, is a good hour east, so block off a morning, book online, and arrive right at opening, or after three, because by midday, you're mostly looking at the backs of other people's heads. I did it in one morning, and that was plenty. The strangest bit is what you can't see. The emperor's own tomb is that grassy hill beside the pits, still sealed. The soldiers were only the guards. Number two's back in the city, and it's the one I nearly skipped. The old city wall. Xi'an was the capital of China for close to 1,000 years, back when it was called Chang'an, and it's one of the only Chinese cities that still has its full wall standing. The Ming Dynasty, China's rulers 600 years back, built the wall you see starting in 1370. It runs in a complete rectangle around the old town, about eight and a half miles around, 40 feet tall, wide enough on top to drive a car. You go up top, rent a bike, and ride the whole loop. The city's spread out below you the entire way. You can walk it or run it too, and locals do both. An easy hour and a half on wheels. Do it late in the day, when the light turns gold and the lanterns come on. I came for the warriors, and the wall is what stuck with me. If you've only got time for one thing in the city itself, make it this, number three. Come down off the wall, walk into the center, and follow your nose to the Muslim Quarter. This is the old neighborhood of Xi'an's Hui community, Chinese Muslims whose families came here as Silk Road traders, the old trade route west, over 1,000 years back. It's the best street food in the city, and because it's a Muslim Quarter, nearly all of it's halal, so no pork. Start with the lamb skewers, grilled over coals with cumin and chili. The one everybody photographs is Rou Jia Mo, chopped braised meat, stuffed into a warm flatbread, basically a Chinese hamburger. Then there's Bang Bang noodles, hand-pulled as wide as a belt, named for the slapping sound the dough makes on the counter. If you sit down for a proper meal, make it Yang Rou Pa Mo, the dish this region is really known for. You tear a dense flatbread into pieces yourself, and they ladle rich mutton soup over the top. And Liang Pi, cold noodles in sesame and chili, is the rare one here that's vegetarian. The people who live here don't eat on the main drag, though. Slip into a side alley called Sa Jin Chow, or the Southgate Morning Market at 6, and it's the same food for half the price, made for locals and not for the camera. The tastiest thing I ate in Xi'an came from a counter in one of those alleys, with no menu I could read, and no clue what I'd ordered. Take the subway south, and No. 4 couldn't be more different from that cramped old quarter. It's called Datong Everbright City, a long, wide walking street lined with buildings made to look like the Tang Dynasty, Xi'an's Golden Age, about 1,300 years back. At night the whole thing glows gold, red lanterns everywhere, street performers, and hundreds of people strolling around in rented Han Fu, the flowing traditional robes, hair and makeup done to match. You can rent an outfit yourself for a few dollars and join them, and whole studios there will do your hair, makeup and photos in the full Tang look, if you want to make an afternoon of it. It's free to walk in, and it's the kind of evening people plan a whole night around. It's all recent, built in the last couple of decades to copy the old Tang look, and that takes nothing away from it. Quick thing while we're on getting around. The city you can walk and subway all day, but a few of the best pieces, the Warriors An Hour Out and A Mountain I'll Get To, sit outside town on a train or a drive. I've put a guide to doing Xi'an cheap in the description, along with the day trip operators worth booking. Worth a look if you're still planning. Walk to the far end of that Datong street and you run straight into number five, the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. It's a big brick tower, seven tiers tall, built back in 652 by a monk named Siwan Zhang to hold the Buddhist scriptures he carried home from India along the Silk Road. If you've come across the old Chinese tale Journey to the West, that monk's who it's based on. The pagoda's worth a look by day, but the real draw is the enormous square out front, home to the largest musical fountain in Asia. A few times a day, and again after dark, the jets leap up in time with old Tang music, some reaching nearly 200 feet, and a thousand people gather to watch it, free. It only runs a handful of times, so check the board before you head over. Line it up with dinner and the Datong street next door, and there's your whole evening. Number six takes you back out east, on the same road as the Terracotta Warriors, so you can pair them in a day. Huaqing Palace was a hot spring retreat for the Tang emperors more than a thousand years ago, set at the foot of a green mountain. You can still see the marble pools they bathed in. There's a famous evening show here, the Song of Everlasting Sorrow, that acts out the tragic story of a Tang emperor and the woman he loved most, his favorite concubine, right on the hillside. That's the pretty version. The part that got me is the history. In 1936, this quiet palace is where two of his own generals kidnapped Chong Qishek, the leader of China's nationalist government at the time. They held him for two weeks to force him to stop fighting the communists and turn against the invading Japanese instead. It worked. That one act changed the course of modern China, and hardly anyone walking the grounds knows it happened right here. Hiding back inside that same Muslim quarter, down a lane called Huozhui, is number seven, the Great Mosque of Xi'an, one of the oldest in the country, first built in 742. It's worth the detour because it doesn't look anything like the mosques you're picturing. There's no dome and no minaret. It looks like a Chinese temple, with sweeping gray-tiled roofs, wooden pillars painted green and gold, and a run of quiet garden courtyards. It's still a working mosque, so the prayer hall's for worshippers, but you can wander the grounds. After the noise and the crush of the food street, stepping in here is like someone turning the volume down. It's the calmest ten minutes in the middle of the city. Two minutes out of that lane, you hit number eight, a matched pair of towers marking the dead center of the old city. The bell tower, built in 1384, stands right where the four main streets cross. The drum tower faces it and marks the entrance to the Muslim quarter. Their names are literal. Back in the day they struck the big bell at dawn and beat the drum at dusk, and that's how the whole city knew the time. Both are floodlit and lovely after dark, and really, that's the way to enjoy them, from the square below with a snack, looking up. You can pay to climb inside, but there's not much up there, so save your money and admire them from the ground. Number nine's the best museum in the city and the one that trips people up, because getting in is a whole thing. The Shaanxi History Museum, Shaanxi being the province Xi'an sits in, walks you through thousands of years of Chinese history with the real treasures, gold, bronze, and Tang Dynasty wall paintings lifted from royal tombs, which are the highlight if you can grab the separate ticket. It's free. That's the catch, because it's free, everyone wants in, so you reserve a timed ticket about five days ahead through a Chinese app, and the slots go fast. I booked mine five days out and only just squeaked in. If this is news to you the night before, aim for the second newer branch on the edge of town instead, which is far easier to get into and half as crowded, and carry your passport in Xi'an because you need it to get into almost everything. Number 10 is food again, and this one's inside the city wall itself. Yongxing Fang packs a hundred-odd Shaanxi snacks into one court. The thing it's famous for is a ritual. You buy a little bowl of rice wine for about a dollar, knock it back, and hurl the empty bowl onto a growing heap of smashed pottery for good luck. It blew up on Douyin, China's version of TikTok, so expect a crowd doing exactly that. It's touristy, it's a bit silly, and it's also great fun, with genuinely good food packed in around it. Back down south, near that pagoda and the light-up street from earlier, is number 11, a park called Tang Paradise. It sits on the grounds of a real Tang Dynasty imperial garden, though what stands today is a recreation of it. The reason to come is the night show, when they light the lake and run a water and laser display, telling old Tang stories across a screen of falling water. The park used to charge to get in. A couple years ago, they made it free. If you're already at the pagoda for the fountain, this is a short walk and an easy add. One small ask before we push on. A tap on the like button is what puts these guides in front of the next traveler planning a trip, and it genuinely helps. Right back to the list. For number 12, head to Gao's Courtyard, a 400-year-old merchant's mansion tucked in the Muslim Quarter, where most evenings they put on a shadow puppet show. Flat figures cut from leather, some with 20 or more moving joints, worked on thin rods behind a lit cloth screen. The story sung out in the thick local Shanxi dialect. As the story goes, shadow puppetry was invented centuries ago to comfort a grieving emperor, though nobody can prove that. True or not, it's a fading craft, the show is short, and you won't see anything like it back home. The old courtyard itself, all carved wood and tea, is worth the small ticket on its own. Ninyat on the eastern edge of the city is number 13, and it's only for a certain kind of traveler. I'll tell you straight if it's you. Banpo is a village site roughly 6,000 years old, from the Stone Age, and it's the oldest layer under everything Xi'an is built on. The museum reads it as a society run by its women. You walk over the outlines of sunken houses, some of the earliest pottery wheels ever found in China, and clay burial jars. It's post holes and pottery shards under a roof, and that's honestly all it is. If you love the deep end of history, you'll find it quietly amazing. If you don't, skip it with a clear conscience. Number 14 is another buried army out near the airport, so it's a perfect stop on the day you fly in or out, and it's almost always empty. It's called Han Yongling, the tomb of a Han dynasty emperor named Jingdi, from about 2,000 years back. Forget the tall soldiers from number one. These figures are about a third of life size, and something strange happened to them over the centuries. They were built with little wooden arms and dressed in real silk clothes, and the wood and the silk rotted clean away, so what's left is thousands of small, smooth, armless little bodies, plus herds of tiny clay pigs and sheep and dogs, a whole miniature kingdom. You walk over the open pits on a glass floor right above the dig, and one detail I love. The oldest tea ever found anywhere in the world was dug out of this tomb. It's the calm, uncrowded version of the thing everyone lines up an hour out of town for. Number 15 costs nothing and is on no map, and it might be my favorite bit of ordinary Xi'an. Every evening after dinner, in squares all over the city, groups of retired locals, mostly older women, set up a speaker and dance, line dances, fan dances, whatever's popular that season. This is a local thing, done for the pure joy of it, in their own square, and you can feel that watching. Stop for 10 minutes. The big square by the Wild Goose Pagoda is a reliable spot. In a city full of tombs and old walls, it's the most alive thing in it. Number 16 is the big finish, and it's a full day out of the city, so give it its own day. Mount Hua Shan, one of the Five Sacred Mountains of China, and about as dramatic as they get. A high-speed train from Xi'an's North Station gets you to the foot of it in around 40 minutes, and cable cars haul you up the sheer cliffs to the peaks, so you don't have to climb a step unless you want to. And then there's the reason it's world famous. Bolted to a vertical cliff hundreds of feet straight down is a walkway made of wooden planks about a foot wide, with nothing under you but air. They clip you into a harness, and you shuffle along it. It's called the Plank Walk, it's completely optional, and plenty of people ride to the top and never go near it, so don't let it scare you off the mountain. Go in spring or fall, when the weather's kind and the sky's clear. Serious hikers climb it through the night to catch sunrise from the east peak, but you don't need to. And you get the peaks whether or not you brave the plank. Standing up there with the whole range dropping away below you is a view that stays with you. Save it for your last day. So that's Xi'an. If you take one thing from all this, make it this. Give the place three days. Everyone gives it one. A rushed morning at the Warriors and a flight out, and they miss the city completely. Come in spring or autumn, when the weather's mild, and skip Golden Week, the national holiday at the start of October, along with Chinese New Year, when the trains sell out weeks ahead and every site turns into a crush. Three days barely covered it for me. The Warriors are what get you to Xi'an. The city is what makes you glad you stayed.