Xi'an Muslim Dasi Residential Quarter

This guide to the Xi'an Muslim Dasi Residential Quarter centers on a number with no plaque to mark it: the nearly twenty thousand Hui Muslims still living inside these city walls when a brutal war between Qing troops and Hui rebels finally stopped in the 1860s. It traces how that same conflict emptied Shaanxi's countryside of its Hui population elsewhere in the province, and asks why this particular quarter, organized for generations around seven mosques and thirteen neighborhoods, came through it so differently. You'll hear about the two-year siege the walls here withstood. Walk the lanes behind the Great Mosque and follow the smell of grilling lamb from a courtyard kitchen.