Discover Xi'an
Daming Palace National Heritage Park
大明宫国家遗址公园
The footprint of the Tang imperial palace - once several times the size of the Forbidden City - preserved as a vast archaeological park with the reconstructed Danfeng Gate at its south end. More open space and foundation platforms than buildings, but it gives you the true scale of Tang Chang'an.
The story
What makes this place special
The Daming Palace was the seat of the Tang court for more than 220 years and the largest palace complex ever built in China - over 4,800 mu, around three and a half times the area of the Forbidden City. Work began in 634 under Taizong as a residence for his retired father Gaozu, stopped when Gaozu died in 635, resumed in 662 and finished in 663, after which it became the political centre of the empire. Its great outer-court hall, Hanyuan Hall, stood on a platform about 15m high, 200m wide and 100m deep, and this is where foreign embassies were received - the physical point of contact between Tang China and the rest of Eurasia. It was destroyed in the rebellions at the end of the Tang. The site was identified in 1957, conservation of Hanyuan Hall ran from 1993 to about 2003, and the Daming Palace National Heritage Park opened on 1 October 2010.
What you’ll discover
Almost nothing standing, and that is the honest summary. The park is a very large open archaeological site of excavated foundations, rammed-earth platforms and marked-out hall outlines across open grass and gravel, with the reconstructed Danfeng Gate built over the original gate ruins to protect them. The Hanyuan Hall platform is a huge earth terrace you can climb for a view over the whole plan. There are exhibition halls of excavated finds and a large scale model of the palace, and a miniature reconstruction of the complex. Distances are enormous; electric carts circulate.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Understand what you are buying before you go: this is a site of foundations, not buildings. Visitors who arrive expecting a palace are reliably disappointed, and visitors who arrive expecting an archaeological park with the biggest imperial footprint in Chinese history find it remarkable.
- See the model and the exhibition first, then walk the foundations. In the other order the earth platforms mean nothing.
- Take the electric cart. The park is kilometres across with no shade, and walking it in summer is a serious undertaking.
- Danfeng Gate is the one piece of architecture, and the ruins are preserved inside it - go in rather than photographing the outside.
- Climb the Hanyuan Hall terrace. Standing where ambassadors were received, looking down the axis towards the city, is the only moment on the site that delivers the scale emotionally.
- Go late in the afternoon in warm months. The park is exposed and treeless, and the low light across the earth platforms is also when it photographs best.
When to come
Late afternoon in spring or autumn. Avoid midday in summer entirely - there is no shade across most of the site - and avoid it after heavy rain, when the earth platforms and gravel paths are muddy.
Getting around
Flat but enormous, and partly unpaved. The main avenues and the areas around Danfeng Gate and the exhibition halls are level and paved, and the electric carts make the distances survivable, so a wheelchair user can see the gate, the museum and the model. The excavated foundations themselves are reached on gravel and earth paths that are hard to push, and the Hanyuan Hall terrace is up a long ramp and steps. For a bad knee it is the distance, not the gradient, that is the problem.
Worth knowing before you go
The park runs a free-admission day on the second Wednesday of each month (08:30-17:00) capped at 5,000 tickets, which must be reserved online the day before.
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