Besides its terracotta army Xi’an is also famous for its walls. In ancient times a wall, known as ‘chengqiang’, defined a Chinese city: no wall, no right to be called a city!

Regrettably, many of these walls were knocked down in more recent times. Beijing’s walls, for example, were demolished in the 1950’s. (Incidentally, Italy, which had the highest number of walled towns in Europe, suffered similar vandalism in the nineteenth century when the walls of such cities as Milan and Florence were knocked down to make way for Paris-style boulevards.)

There are still, however, some fine Chinese walled cities remaining today. For example, at Kaifeng, Pingyaio, Shanxi, Dali, Jingzhou, Xingcheng and Xi’an.

We visited Xi’an’s walls on our second day there and found them truly impressive. They are, like other Chinese city walls, built as a quadrilateral and extend, 40 feet wide and high, for almost 9 miles enclosing an area of about 14 square miles. The walls have all the features of feudal fortifications including gates, ramparts, barbicans, archery and watch towers, drawbridge and even a moat surrounding the whole complex.

Living near a walled town in Italy (Lucca), I was interested in a comparison. Lucca’s town walls are two miles long and are not as high or as wide as Xi’an’s. They also do not have machicolations as they were built when firepower had already been invented and their moat has been long since drained.

What the much smaller Lucca walls have, however, is rather greater charm: they support a beautiful avenue of trees and the majority of buildings within their perimeter are old and very picturesque. The city gates, too, are highly attractive. Xi’an’s walls, on the other hand, enclose a largely modern-looking city with ubiquitous high rise buildings and contrast heavily with their surroundings.

What the Xi’an city walls do have, however, is a length almost five times greater than that of Lucca (they used to be even longer in the Tang dynasty) and a more imposing and impenetrable appearance. They also have much better explanations of their features than Lucca’s walls.

We didn’t have the four hours it takes to do a leisurely stroll around Xi’an’s walls but we managed to get a good feel for them in our short time on them:

In the evening Xi’an’s city walls and their features are illuminated with multicoloured lights.

I wonder if Lucca’s walls should follow the same act? I somehow doubt it….

However, don’t forget: at one time Xi’an was at the start of the silk route and Lucca was at the end of the same route. A twinning of two walled cities perhaps?