Golfing Through China: Xi'an

Xi'an, which used to be the starting point of the Silk Road and was the world's most prosperous city under the Tang dynasty, is my second-to-last stop on this trip. I'm leaving the world-famous Terra-Cotta Warriors for my final day in the city, and started out my first day in Xi'an at the city walls, which were built in 1370. The walls form a square surrounding the city of Xi'an, and are 8.5 miles long, 40 feet high and 50 to 60 feet wide. The walls also have a moat around them, 8,000 battlements and some of my pictures show the moat that then surrounds the walls. Most of the walls have been rebuilt, but it's still really cool to be able to walk the length of the walls and get a sense of how imposing these walls must have been around 640 years ago. I walked for about and hour and a half along the top of the walls, covering about half of the city (the west and south walls).

I then went to the Bell Tower, which is where the four main streets of Xi'an meet, and hopped on a bus to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, originally built in 648 to contain the Buddhist sutras brought from India to China. There's a big complex of fountains in front of the pagoda where kids play during the hot summer days and the fountains synchronize with a song that plays throughout the square, creating a pretty nice show. You can actually enter this pagoda, and I walked up the seven flights of stairs to the top, where I watched the fountain show and got a good view of the surrounding parts of Xi'an that lie outside the walls.

At night the Drum and Bell Towers are lit up, so I walked around that area. The Bell Tower originally had a bell in it that was rung at dawn, and the Drum Tower was used to signal nightfall. Both towers were originally built during the 14th century and were rebuilt in the 1700s.