Xi'an: Day Trips Worth Taking
Xi’an’s walled old city takes 2-3 days to cover properly; everything past that is really a day trip out and back. Here’s what’s actually worth the time.
The Terracotta Army
Technically a day trip in its own right, 35-40km northeast in Lintong District, though most itineraries treat it as an unmissable Day 1 rather than an optional add-on. Bus 306 (CNY 7, cash only) runs from Xi’an Railway Station’s East Square, about an hour each way; adult entry is CNY 120 off-peak, booked online in advance since there’s no walk-up window. See our full Xi’an guide for the details on the pits and the still-unexcavated tomb mound.
Mount Huashan
The furthest and most physically demanding option, and the one that genuinely needs a full day: high-speed rail from Xi’an North to Huashan North takes about 30 minutes, but the mountain itself, one of China’s Five Great Taoist Mountains, and its cable cars and queues eat the rest of the day, 10-12 hours door to door. The Plank Walk in the Sky, a harnessed, ticketed path on the South Peak restricted to ages 15-55, is the headline draw and genuinely vertigo-inducing, expect real queues by midday.
Huaqing Palace
About 30km east near Lintong, close enough to pair with the Terracotta Army if you’re tight on time. Entry runs roughly CNY 120 for the reconstructed Tang-dynasty hot-spring palace built for Emperor Xuanzong’s consort Yang Guifei, plus the genuine historical weight of the site: this is where the 1936 Xi’an Incident took place, when Chiang Kai-shek was detained by his own generals, an event that forced the Kuomintang-Communist united front against Japan.
Han Yang Ling
Roughly 25km north, the tomb complex of Han Emperor Jingdi is the Terracotta Army’s underrated cousin: tens of thousands of smaller figures, around 60cm, viewed through glass floors over open pits, at a fraction of the crowd and roughly CNY 65 walk-up entry, no advance booking required.
Qianling Mausoleum
About 85km northwest, the joint tomb of Emperor Gaozong and Empress Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor, marked by a Spirit Way lined with 61 headless stone envoy statues and a deliberately blank “Wordless Stele.” A genuine UNESCO-caliber site that sees a fraction of the closer sights’ visitors.
Famen Temple
The furthest of the common day trips, about 120km west, home to a relic believed by tradition to be a finger bone of the Buddha, discovered in the temple’s underground crypt in 1987. Public transit is genuinely thin out here, an organized tour or private car is the realistic way in, and it’s worth budgeting a good 4 hours of round-trip driving on top of the visit itself.
For how to sequence these against the walled-city core, our itineraries from 4 days up are built around exactly this trade-off.