Xi’an & Luoyang Ancient Capitals 5-Day Tour

Overview

• ✓Terracotta Army and the Ming city wall of Xi'an
• ✓Longmen Grottoes — 2,345 niches and 100,000 Buddhist images in a limestone gorge
• ✓Shaolin Temple and a martial arts performance by the monastery's monks
• ✓Shaanxi History Museum and the Great Wild Goose Pagoda
• ✓White Horse Temple, China's first Buddhist monastery, founded in 68 AD
• ✓Muslim Quarter street food in Xi'an and Luoyang water banquet dinner

1. 1 Arrival in Xi'an & the Muslim Quarter

   🍽Dinner 🏨Xi'an, 4-star hotel

   Afternoon: Meet your guide at the airport or Xi'an North station and transfer to the hotel inside the city wall.

   Evening: A guided introduction to the Muslim Quarter — the Hui neighbourhood around the Great Mosque, where the streets fill with charcoal smoke after dark. Dinner is at a courtyard restaurant: lamb soup with bread, cold noodles with sesame, and skewers cooked to order.

   Practical note: The Great Mosque, founded in 742 AD and rebuilt in the Ming, is Chinese in form — pagoda roofs, courtyards, a moon-watching tower — and Islamic in purpose. We visit it on day three during opening hours.

2. 2 Terracotta Army & the Ming City Wall

   🍽Breakfast, Lunch 🏨Xi'an, 4-star hotel

   08:30 - Terracotta Army: A 50-minute drive east to Lintong. Three pits, more than 8,000 figures, and a museum that explains the manufacture and the accidental discovery of 1974. We spend the full morning, moving from the massed ranks of Pit 1 to the command post at Pit 3 and the ongoing excavation in Pit 2, finishing in the bronze chariot hall.

   12:30 - Lunch near the site.

   14:30 - City wall by bicycle: The only complete Ming city wall surviving in China, 13.7 kilometres around, wide enough on top that two vehicles could pass. We hire bikes at the South Gate and ride at our own pace, with the option to stop at the ramparts and the moat parks.

   Evening: Free. Your guide can arrange the Tang dynasty dinner show, or you can return to the Muslim Quarter, which rewards repeat visits.

3. 3 Pagodas, Museum & the Great Mosque

   🍽Breakfast, Lunch 🏨Xi'an, 4-star hotel

   08:30 - Great Wild Goose Pagoda: Built in 652 AD to house the sutras brought back from India by the monk Xuanzang, whose sixteen-year journey became the basis of Journey to the West. The seven-storey brick tower survived the Tang; the surrounding temple was rebuilt in the Ming. We climb part of the way for the view over the South Square.

   10:30 - Shaanxi History Museum: Free to enter and one of the finest regional museums in China. The Zhou bronzes, Qin weaponry and Tang gold are arranged to show exactly how the capital you have been walking around came to be.

   12:30 - Lunch: A dumpling banquet, with the full range of Shaanxi fillings and shapes.

   14:00 - Great Mosque: A quiet walled compound of courtyards, gardens and prayer halls in Chinese architectural style, still in daily use by the Hui community.

   16:00 - Free time: Rest, or the Small Wild Goose Pagoda in the Jianfu Temple grounds, a slenderer 8th-century tower that survived several earthquakes.

4. 4 Rail to Luoyang & the Longmen Grottoes

   🍽Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner (water banquet) 🏨Luoyang, 4-star hotel

   08:00 - High-speed rail: Around two hours east to Luoyang, capital of nine dynasties and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road in its Han and Tang incarnations.

   10:30 - Longmen Grottoes: A 1-kilometre stretch of limestone cliff on both banks of the Yi River, carved between 493 and 1127 AD with 2,345 niches, 2,800 inscriptions and around 100,000 Buddhist images. The high point is the Fengxian Temple niche, where the 17-metre Vairocana Buddha sits flanked by disciples, bodhisattvas and guardians — Tang sculpture at the moment of its greatest confidence. Your guide explains why so many faces were deliberately destroyed.

   13:00 - Lunch near the site.

   15:00 - White Horse Temple: Founded in 68 AD under the Eastern Han, the first Buddhist monastery established in China by imperial decree, on the spot where the Han emperor dreamed of a golden figure flying from the west. The current buildings are mostly Ming and Qing, on the original site.

   19:00 - Dinner: Luoyang shui xi, the water banquet — 24 courses, most of them soupy and served in quick succession, a tradition said to date to the Tang and to have been invented for a general who wanted his food hot and fast.

5. 5 Shaolin Temple & Departure

   🍽Breakfast, Lunch 🏨Not included

   07:30 - Departure: An 80-minute drive southeast to Dengfeng and Mount Song.

   09:00 - Shaolin Temple: Founded in 495 AD for the monk Batuo and made famous by Bodhidharma, who is said to have sat facing a wall for nine years and introduced Chan meditation here. The complex was burned and rebuilt repeatedly; what stands now dates largely from the 20th century, but the Pagoda Forest — 240 brick memorial stupas for monks from the Tang onward — is genuinely old and atmospheric.

   10:30 - Martial arts performance: In the hall near the entrance, monks and students from the surrounding schools perform forms, weapons routines and feats of flexibility and balance. It lasts around 30 minutes and is included.

   12:00 - Lunch: A vegetarian monastery meal, or a Dengfeng restaurant if the group prefers.

   14:00 - Return and departure: Drive back to Luoyang (around 90 minutes) for your high-speed train to Xi'an, or continue to Zhengzhou airport for an onward flight. Your guide assists with check-in and luggage.

Gallery

Good to know