Xingqinggong Park

This guide to Xingqinggong Park in Xi'an opens with a detail that does not add up: a lake and hills that look like an eighth-century royal garden but were actually dug by hand. It traces the site back to Emperor Xuanzong's Xingqing Palace, the political heart of Tang China for over four decades and the stage for his romance with Yang Guifei, before following what became of the ruin once the palace burned and rotted into farmland. You'll hear how Xi'an called for volunteers in the spring of 1958, with Jiaotong University relocating next door, and how soldiers, students and grandmothers answered with shovels and handcarts. Walk the shoreline and look for the halls carrying names lifted straight from Tang poetry.