Discover Xi'an
Muslim Quarter & Great Mosque
回民街・化觉巷清真大寺
The lanes behind the Drum Tower are the heart of Xi'an's Hui Muslim community and the city's best-known street-food run - lamb skewers, roujiamo flatbread sandwiches and paomo mutton soup. Tucked off the main drag, the Great Mosque is a 14th-century complex built entirely in Chinese temple style, with pagoda-form minaret and courtyards.
The story
What makes this place special
Xi'an's Hui Muslim community descends from the traders, soldiers and settlers who came down the Silk Road into Tang Chang'an, and the quarter around Huajue Lane has been Muslim for centuries rather than decades. The Great Mosque at 30 Huajue Lane traces its founding by tradition to 742 CE under the Tang emperor Xuanzong; nothing of that survives, and it has been rebuilt at least four times, the present complex being essentially Ming with major Qing reconstruction. It is architecturally remarkable for being a Chinese building rather than a Middle Eastern one - courtyards, timber halls, tiled roofs, stone steles and no minaret, with an octagonal pagoda-like tower, the Shengxinlou, standing in for one. The prayer hall seats over a thousand; a normal Friday congregation is around a hundred.
What you’ll discover
The quarter is a grid of lanes north-west of the Drum Tower, lit up and dense with food stalls - men pounding meat, hand-pulled noodles, flatbread ovens, whole lamb carcasses, piles of dried fruit and nuts. Beiyuanmen, the lane running north from the Drum Tower arch, is the main one and is almost entirely a tourist food street. Behind it, through an unmarked turning off the souvenir stalls, the Great Mosque occupies a long east-west sequence of four or five walled courtyards: a decorative timber arch, a stone-stele courtyard, the Shengxinlou tower, then the final courtyard and the turquoise-roofed prayer hall oriented towards Mecca.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Beiyuanmen is not where locals eat. The genuinely good food is a few lanes west and north - Dapiyuan, Xiyangshi and Sajinqiao lanes - where the prices are lower, the queues are Chinese and the same dishes are better. Walk ten minutes past the first stalls.
- The mosque is hard to find on purpose: the entrance is down a narrow souvenir alley off Huajue Lane with a modest gate, and most visitors walk past it. It is the quietest place in the quarter and the contrast with the street is the point of going.
- Non-Muslims can walk the courtyards and read the steles but may not enter the prayer hall, and you should not visit around Friday midday prayers. Dress covering shoulders and knees.
- The quarter is Hui and halal - there is no pork anywhere in it, and no alcohol in most places. Order lamb and beef: yangrou paomo (bread torn into mutton broth), roujiamo, cold liangpi noodles, biangbiang noodles, and the small fried persimmon cakes, which are a local autumn speciality.
- Eat standing at the stalls rather than sitting in the restaurants with English photo menus and touts at the door. Have cash or a working Chinese mobile payment app; many stalls take nothing else.
- Go on a weekday evening, not a weekend one. The lanes are narrow, there is no crowd control, and on a Saturday night it becomes a stationary mass of people.
When to come
Evening, from about 6pm, when the stalls are all working and the lanes are lit - that is when the quarter is itself. For the mosque, go in the morning when the courtyards are empty and cool, then come back to eat after dark. Autumn is the season for persimmon and pomegranate.
Getting around
Hard work. The lanes are narrow, crowded, uneven and partly cobbled, with scooters, stall overspill and standing crowds, and there is no way to move predictably in a wheelchair at a busy hour - go in the morning if you must go at all. The mosque is better: its courtyards are mostly level paved ground, but there are raised thresholds at the gates between courtyards and steps up to the prayer hall terrace. A bad knee is fine on the flat but should expect a long time on its feet with nowhere to sit down in the food lanes.
Worth knowing before you go
Beiyuanmen, the main lane, is the touristy one. Turn into Huajue Lane, Dapiyuan or Sajinqiao for the stalls locals actually queue at - skewers run about 15-¥20 and a bowl of paomo 35-¥50. Non-Muslim visitors can enter the mosque's courtyards but not the prayer hall.
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