Fuddland
(西安) and the surrounding area is positively brimming over with sites of historical importance, and it’s well worth spending a good few days visiting the city of you want to be sure to make the most of the places of interest on offer.
The downtown area is enclosed by the imposingly-tall city walls, first built in 1370 then rebuilt to last in 1568; eighteen metres thick at the base and not much narrower at the top, you can certainly imagine they formed a bit of a barrier to anyone contemplating a city invasion. You can walk along the wall by ascending at any of the four city gates, and it’s a great way to get a feel for the city below, as well as admire the architecture of the gatehouses and [very recently restored] watchtowers. I started at the South Gate and was intending to walk only as far as the East Gate, but I found the views so interesting, and the stroll so peaceful with hardly anyone else around, that I ended up circumnavigating the whole downtown area along the wall — a 12 kilometre walk that took me about three hours, with plenty of stopping for photos and gazing down at the people and buildings below. [For a high-speed version of the same route, you can hire bikes and tandems for an unusual limit of 100 or 200 minutes (an attempt to decimalise time?)].
The east end of the city was particularly interesting, being noticeably more rundown than the rest of the downtown area and consisting mostly of tightly-packed low blocks of flats along narrow streets, each one with small, almost spontaneous-looking fruit and vegetable markets. Dust and grime pervades , an omnipresent cloud that varies in intensity day-by-day and coats the buildings and streets throughout the city in a layer of filth despite efforts to keep the dust down by spraying the roads with water each morning, but the east end of town seemed to be losing the battle faster than elsewhere.
