Discover Xi'an
Great Tang All Day Mall (Tang Dynasty Ever-Bright City)
大唐不夜城
A kilometre-long pedestrian boulevard between the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and Qujiang, lined with Tang-style buildings and roaming street performers in period costume. Free, completely over the top, and the single most fun thing to do in Xi'an after dark.
The story
What makes this place special
A pedestrian boulevard in the Qujiang New District, built in the 2000s on the axis between the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and Tang Paradise, in a Tang-revival idiom - a modern leisure development rather than a historic street, and best approached as such. Reported figures vary: a central sculpture avenue around 2,100m long, and a district of roughly 520,000-650,000m². Its subject is the Tang: the avenue carries themed sculpture groups of Tang rulers and figures - Li Shimin, Wu Zetian, Li Longji, the monk Xuanzang - arranged around the Zhenguan and Kaiyuan eras and Buddhist culture. It has become the engine of Xi'an's night-tourism boom, reported at 75 million visits between April and December 2020.
What you’ll discover
A very wide paved avenue, around two kilometres end to end, closed to traffic, lined with timber-and-tile shopfronts housing malls, restaurants, teahouses and bookshops, with groups of bronze statuary down the middle and the lit Big Wild Goose Pagoda closing the view at the north end. After dark the whole street is floodlit and filled with street performers, musicians and very large numbers of people in rented Tang costume with full hair and makeup being photographed. There are regular free performances - drumming, dance, a fire-spitting act and a well-known 'living statue' routine.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Come at night, and only at night. In daylight it is a shopping street with statues; after dark it is the liveliest street in inland China and the reason people now visit Xi'an for more than the terracotta figures.
- The costume-and-photography business is the local phenomenon. Studios all along the side streets will dress and style you for a couple of hours for a modest price - this is what the street is actually for, and joining in costs less than most visitors assume.
- The street performances are free and scheduled; ask or look for the crowds forming. The fire performer and the Tang-costume processions draw the biggest.
- It is walkable from the Big Wild Goose Pagoda's North Plaza fountain show at one end to Tang Paradise at the other, so chain the three in a single evening rather than treating them as separate attractions.
- The food on the avenue is chain restaurants and mall food courts. For a proper Xi'an meal, go to Yongxingfang or the Muslim Quarter and come here afterwards.
- Weekend and holiday nights are extraordinarily crowded, with crowd-control barriers and one-way flow. A weekday night gives you the same spectacle with room to move.
When to come
After dark, any night, and preferably a weekday. Spring and autumn evenings are ideal; it is pleasant in summer once the sun is down, which is precisely why it fills up.
Getting around
Among the best in Xi'an. The avenue is a flat, smooth, wide, traffic-free paved street with gentle gradients, benches, lifts in the adjoining malls and accessible toilets, so a wheelchair or a bad knee can do the whole length - and because it is wide, crowds are less of an obstacle here than in the Muslim Quarter. The constraints are the sheer length, around a kilometre each way, and the density of people on a weekend night.
Worth knowing before you go
All the outdoor performances are free. The famous 'living statue' acts (Shi Yi, the bronze-painted poet Li Bai) draw crowds at fixed spots - check the WeChat account for that evening's schedule rather than wandering and hoping.
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