Xi’an keeps the nation’s time. The National Time Service Center, in the city’s Lintong district, generates and broadcasts China’s standard time; while Lantian County, also part of Xi’an, gave up a skull more than a million years old.
西安替全国守着时间。位于临潼区的国家授时中心，负责产生并播发中国的标准时间。同属西安的蓝田县，出土过一具一百多万年前的头骨。
The clock is the younger of the two.
这两样东西里，钟是年轻的那个。
The skull from Gongwangling in Lantian County was announced on 3 November 1964. Researchers have since dated it to about 1.63 million years ago.
蓝田公王岭出土的这具头骨，于一九六四年十一月三日公布。研究人员后来测定，它的年代约为一百六十三万年前。
Early Humans, Early Villages
早期的人，早期的村落
That date is itself a revision. The skull was long put at 1.15 million years old, until a study published in the Journal of Human Evolution pushed it back by almost half a million years. Our China Story calls it the oldest known Homo erectus in northern Asia, more primitive than Peking Man and closer to Java Man; the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which announced the find, described it as an essentially intact female skull.
这个年代本身就是修订的结果。头骨长期被认为距今一百一十五万年，后来《人类进化杂志》发表的一项研究把它往前推了将近五十万年。“我们的中国故事”网站称，它是北亚已知最古老的直立人，比北京人更原始，更接近爪哇人；公布这一发现的中国科学院称，它是一具基本保存完整的女性头骨。
Far more recent villagers left their homes at Banpo, on the city’s eastern edge. Shi Xingbang’s team dug there through the 1950s, and People’s Daily reported that they found 46 complete houses, 250 tombs, more than 200 storage pits and over 10,000 tools and household objects in a village about 6,000 years old.
近得多的村民把家留在了城东的半坡。石兴邦带领的团队在二十世纪五十年代在此发掘。《人民日报》报道，他们在这个约六千年前的村落里发现了四十六座完整的房屋、二百五十座墓葬、两百多个储藏坑，以及一万多件工具和生活用品。
Their collapsed round house and large rectangular house were the first complete prehistoric dwellings found in China, the paper said. The museum built on the site opened in April 1958 as the country’s first prehistoric site museum.
报道称，其中坍塌的圆形房屋和大型方形房屋，是中国发现的第一批完整的史前居住遗迹。建在遗址上的博物馆于一九五八年四月开馆，是中国第一座史前遗址博物馆。
The Stone that Spoke Syriac
会说叙利亚文的石头
In 781 CE, in Tang Chang’an, a Christian bishop named Yesupuji set up a stone tablet. A Persian monk of the Daqin Temple, Jingjing, wrote its text, and Lü Xiuyan wrote it out in regular script.
公元七八一年，在唐代长安，一位名叫耶质蒲吉的景教主教立起了一块石碑。碑文由大秦寺的波斯僧人景净撰写，吕秀岩用楷书书丹。
The Daqin Jingjiao Liuxing Zhongguo Stele stands 356 centimetres tall including base and top, according to the Xi’an Beilin Museum’s collection series on The Paper. The main text is Chinese, but Syriac appears on the first and last lines, on the lower part and down the sides.
据澎湃新闻“西安碑林馆藏系列”介绍，《大秦景教流行中国碑》连底座和碑首高三百五十六厘米。正文是汉字，但第一行和最后一行、碑的下部和侧面都刻有叙利亚文。
The stele was probably buried around the Buddhist suppression under Emperor Wuzong, the same source says. It was rediscovered in the 1620s and moved to the Beilin in 1907.
同一来源称，石碑大概是在唐武宗灭佛前后被埋入地下的，一六二〇年代重新被发现，一九〇七年移入碑林。
The Manchu City in 1911
一九一一年的满城
On 22 October 1911 Shaanxi revolutionaries working with the Gelaohui rose in Xi’an under Zhang Fenghui. The Shaanxi provincial government says Shaanxi was the first province in northern China, and the second in the country after Hunan, to answer the Wuchang uprising.
一九一一年十月二十二日，陕西革命党人联合哥老会，在张凤翙率领下于西安起义。陕西省政府网站称，陕西是北方第一个、全国继湖南之后第二个响应武昌起义的省份。
The Manchu City, a walled compound in the north-east of Xi’an, fell on 24 October. The historian Edward Rhoads puts its banner garrison at about 20,000 people. Citing the British missionary J. C. Keyte, who investigated some months later, Rhoads reports an estimate of at least 10,000 people killed or dead by suicide. The garrison’s commanding general, Wenrui, drowned himself in a well.
满城是西安城东北角一处有城墙的营区，十月二十四日陷落。历史学家路康乐（Edward Rhoads）估计，这里的驻防旗人约有两万。他援引英国传教士J. C. Keyte数月后的调查，称被杀和自尽者估计至少有一万人。驻防将军文瑞投井而死。
Rhoads writes that wealthy survivors were held for ransom, that young women and girls were taken as wives or servants, and that others were expelled from the city with nothing.
路康乐写道，有钱的幸存者被扣下勒索赎金，年轻妇女和女孩被人带走为妻或为婢，其余的人被逐出城外，一无所有。
Trains, Trade and Airports
火车、贸易与机场
Xi’an’s GDP reached ¥1.39 trillion in 2025, up 4.7 percent, said Wang Junping, deputy director of the municipal development and reform commission, at a press conference. The municipal government gives the year-end population as 13.24 million. Six pillar industries, among them cars, electronic information and high-end equipment, produced 77.9 percent of above-scale industrial output.
西安市发展和改革委员会副主任王军平在新闻发布会上说，二〇二五年西安生产总值达到一点三九万亿元，增长百分之四点七。市政府公布的年末常住人口为一千三百二十四万。汽车、电子信息、高端装备等六大支柱产业，占规模以上工业总产值的百分之七十七点九。
Exports rose 25.8 percent to ¥349.3 billion, and electric passenger vehicle exports rose 66.1 percent, China News Service reported. The China-Europe Railway Express (Xi’an) sent more than 6,000 trains in 2025 for the first time, up more than 21 percent.
中新社报道，出口增长百分之二十五点八，达到三千四百九十二亿六千万元，电动载人汽车出口增长百分之六十六点一。中欧班列（西安）二〇二五年首次开行超过六千列，增长超过百分之二十一。
By air, the Shaanxi Frontier Inspection Station reported more than 7,000 international flights in the first half of 2026, 5,700 of them passenger flights, on routes that include Novosibirsk, Vienna, Paris and Rome. Xi’an Xianyang International Airport opened its new Terminal 5 in February 2025, according to the municipal government, and China News Service said supporting works for the third-phase expansion were still under construction in early 2026. The Xi’an East railway station and the Xi’an–Kaifeng and Xi’an–Shiyan high-speed lines are advancing.
空运方面，陕西出入境边防检查总站报告，二〇二六年上半年的国际航班超过七千架次，其中客运航班五千七百多架次，航线包括新西伯利亚、维也纳、巴黎和罗马。据市政府介绍，西安咸阳国际机场新建的T5航站楼已于二〇二五年二月启用；中新社称，三期扩建的配套工程在二〇二六年初仍在建设。西安东站以及西安至开封、西安至十堰高铁正在推进。
The Clock in Lintong
临潼的钟
Construction of the Northwest Time Service Station began in 1966 on Jinzhi Mountain in Pucheng, under the project code 326. Around 1970 Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the trial broadcast to begin, and in 1981 the Shaanxi station took over China’s short-wave time service from the Shanghai Observatory, according to the National Time Service Center’s own history.
一九六六年，西北授时台在蒲城金栉山动工，工程代号“三二六”。据国家授时中心自己的历史介绍，一九七〇年前后周恩来总理下令开始试播，一九八一年陕西台从上海天文台手中接过了全国短波授时的任务。
The centre’s time-frequency reference and laboratories moved to Lintong in 1980, and the centre took its present name in 2001. The signal still goes out under the call sign BPM, on 2.5, 5, 10 and 15 megahertz.
授时中心的时间频率基准和实验室于一九八〇年迁往临潼，二〇〇一年改称现名。播发的信号至今沿用呼号BPM，频率为二点五、五、十和十五兆赫。
