Datang Everbright City

This guide to Datang Everbright City in Xi'an opens with the death of the imperial consort Yang Guifei at Mawei Station in 756, and Emperor Xuanzong's grief afterward, when he summoned a Taoist priest said to move between the living and the dead to search for her soul. It follows the poet Bai Juyi's telling of that search in the Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and the old promise lovers across the Tang world made against death, to reunite as twin birds or twin branches. Along the pedestrian street itself, a bronze sculpture at Kaiyuan Square recalls the couple, and after dark visitors rent Tang-style robes while lanterns replace the moonlight the poem describes.