Who ruled Xi'an?

Xi'an lies in the Wei River valley of Shaanxi province, in the heart of the fertile basin known as Guanzhong, "within the passes". Mountains and narrow passes ring the valley, which made it both a granary and a fortress, and for more than a thousand years it was the favoured seat of Chinese dynasties. Under the name Chang'an it was the capital of the Western Han and the Tang, and the eastern end of the overland routes to Central Asia. Its later history is that of a great former capital that became a provincial city.

People farmed the valley long before any state existed: the Neolithic village of Banpo, on the city's eastern edge, is more than 6,000 years old. The Zhou dynasty built its first capitals, Feng and Hao, just south-west of the modern city in the 11th century BCE, and ruled from there until 771 BCE. The state of Qin later made its capital at Xianyang, across the Wei, and from there Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BCE. His tomb, guarded by the terracotta army found by farmers in 1974, lies some 35 kilometres north-east of the city centre.

After Qin collapsed, Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty, built a new capital south of the river in 202 BCE and called it Chang'an, "lasting peace". Its walls went up in the 190s BCE. From Chang'an the envoy Zhang Qian set out for Central Asia, and the trade that followed made the city the starting point of the Silk Road. When the Eastern Han moved the capital to Luoyang in 25 CE, Chang'an declined, and in the centuries of division that followed it was fought over by northern regimes, including the Xianbei rulers whom the map calls the Toba Wei.

In 582 the founder of the Sui dynasty built an enormous new walled city, Daxing, beside the ruined Han capital. The Tang dynasty renamed it Chang'an and made it perhaps the largest city in the world, with around a million people inside a grid of walled wards covering more than 80 square kilometres. Merchants, monks and envoys came from Persia, Central Asia, Korea and Japan, and Christian, Zoroastrian and Manichaean communities lived alongside Buddhists and Daoists. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was built in 652 to house the scriptures that the monk Xuanzang brought back from India.

The An Lushan Rebellion brought rebel troops into the city in 756, and the Huang Chao rebels sacked it in the 880s. In 904 the warlord Zhu Wen forced the Tang emperor Zhaozong to move to Luoyang and had the palaces and houses torn down. No later dynasty made it the capital of all China. It remained a regional centre under the Song until the Jurchen Jin conquered the north in the 1120s, and passed to the Mongols in the 13th century, so the map's Song colouring up to 1279 runs too long.

The city that survived was much smaller. In 1369 the Ming renamed it Xi'an, "western peace", and in the 1370s built the brick walls that still enclose the old centre, among the best preserved in China. A large Hui Muslim community grew up around the Great Mosque. The Shaanxi earthquake of 1556, centred east of the city, killed some 830,000 people across the region, one of the deadliest in recorded history. In December 1936, in the Xi'an Incident, the general Zhang Xueliang detained Chiang Kai-shek in the city to press him into a united front with the communists against Japan.

After 1949 Xi'an became an industrial, military and university centre of north-west China, and the excavation of the terracotta army made it one of the best-known archaeological centres in the world. The municipality now has about 13 million people, and the city remains the capital of Shaanxi.