Lintong: the Terracotta Army and Huaqing Palace

A 65-minute dance drama of the emperor-and-consort love story performed on Jiulong Lake inside Huaqing Palace, with Mount Li lit up as the backdrop — running since 2006, close to 7,000 performances by the company's own count, and the one Chinese 'live landscape show' most worth an evening. Ticketed separately from the palace (¥199-988 by seat block, no admission ticket needed), real-name, no refunds, and every show night has up to four back-to-back performances from 19:10. The official English site sells seats; the seat voucher is collected at the East Gate after 15:00 against your passport.

The Tang emperors' hot-spring retreat at the foot of Mount Li, 30 km east of the city and 6 km short of the Terracotta Army: the excavated stone bath basins of Xuanzong and his consort Yang Guifei (dry, roofed, a museum), Tang-style halls and two lakes rebuilt around them, the 1936 rooms where Chiang Kai-shek was seized in the Xi'an Incident, and the forest park up Mount Li with the beacon tower — all on one ¥120 ticket that also covers the mountain. The official English site sells tickets, accepts passports and gives the hours in English, which makes it the easiest ticket of the Lintong day. Metro Line 9 ends at the gate.

The three excavated pits of the First Emperor's buried army, 40 km east of the city — Pit 1 alone holds the ranks of soldiers everyone has seen in photographs, seen from a walkway above the trench. One ticket covers this site and the tomb park 2 km away (Lishan Garden, with the bronze chariots), linked by a free shuttle; the museum itself says allow about 1.5 hours at each. Everything about the visit is real-name and online: you book on the official website or WeChat official accounts with your passport number, the museum stops selling at 65,000 visitors a day, and there is no walk-up window to fall back on.

A privately run exhibition hall on the same Qinling North Road as the museum, 7 km short of it, that stages a 1:3 model of the emperor's burial chamber as described by the historian Sima Qian — mercury rivers, jewelled ceiling, waxwork court. It is not the mausoleum, not part of the museum, and not on the museum's ticket; it exists in our atlas because drivers, touts and some tour packages steer visitors here as if it were 'the tomb'. The real tomb park is Lishan Garden, inside the museum ticket.

The way the museum itself tells you to come, and the one route with no touts on it: Metro Line 9 east to its terminus Huaqingchi (the palace is at Exit B/C), out of Exit C, 197 m to the Huaqingchi bus stop, then Lintong bus 613 or 602 to the 兵马俑 stop and a 170-metre walk — the museum's page times the whole thing from the airport at about 2.5 hours, so from the city wall count on 1.5 hours. Line 9 starts at Fangzhicheng on Line 1; from Bell Tower that is Line 2 → Line 1 → Line 9. The museum's alternative is a direct coach from the Qinfeng depot by Tonghuamen station (Line 3).

The tomb itself: a 50-metre grassed pyramid over the unexcavated burial chamber of the First Emperor, in a walled archaeological park 2 km from the pits, with the two half-size bronze chariots (dug up in 1980) in their own museum since 2021. It is the second half of the Terracotta Army ticket — same real-name booking, free shuttle between the sites, about 1.5 hours here by the museum's own estimate. Most day-trippers skip it; that is the reason to come.

The one direct coach the museum itself prints on its transport page: from the 'Qinfeng depot' bus stop, 310 m from Exit D (north-east) of Tonghuamen station on Metro Line 3, non-stop to the museum's own bus stop and a 174 m walk. The museum gives the route and nothing else; the fare and hours we have are a 2024 notice reposted by a listings site — ¥30 single, departures 8:00-14:00 about every half hour, last coach back 16:00, enquiries 029-86691444 — and no 2026 timetable has been published anywhere we could read. Three different products in Xi'an sell under the name 'Terracotta Army direct coach' (兵马俑直通车); this is the only one the museum names, and the name is the first thing to check.

For thirty years the cheap public bus from the railway station to the Terracotta Army, ¥7 all the way, and for just as long the reason 'fake Bus 5' is a phrase: private coaches and touts around the station selling the same trip with shopping stops. The line survived a 2019 threat of cancellation and was moved out of the station area; where it starts today is not something we can pin to an official page — platform listings disagree, and the museum's own 2026 transport page no longer mentions it at all, recommending Metro Line 9 instead. We keep the entry because the touts are still there: know what the real bus looks like, or skip it and take the metro.

The cheapest and fastest leg to Lintong is a conventional train, not a high-speed one: from Xi'an station (the old station by the city wall, not Xi'an North), slow trains and two intercity C-trains reach Lintong station in 18-23 minutes for ¥5-10, twelve departures a day out and nine back on the 12306 timetable we read. Lintong station is on the Longhai line north of the town: about 2.5 km north of Huaqingchi metro station and 6.5 km west of the Terracotta Army, so the last leg is a taxi or a local bus. It is a real option for anyone already at the old station or coming in by slow train, and the only rail there is: 12306 lists no station called Lintong East, and nothing runs from Xi'an North to Lintong.