Xi'an Museum (with Small Wild Goose Pagoda)

Xi'an Museum stands beside the Small Wild Goose Pagoda on Youyi West Road, combining a modern museum building, opened in 2007, with the historic pagoda and the surviving halls of Jianfu Temple, on whose grounds the pagoda was built. The Small Wild Goose Pagoda itself dates to 707-709 CE, during the Tang dynasty, built to house Buddhist sutras brought back from India by the monk Yijing, and takes its 'small' name in contrast to the larger Big Wild Goose Pagoda elsewhere in the city associated with the monk Xuanzang. The 13-story brick pagoda originally stood about 45 meters tall; a major earthquake in 1556 cracked it vertically and reduced its height by roughly three meters, and the crack remains visible today as physical evidence of the structure's seismic history. The modern museum galleries, arranged separately from the pagoda and temple grounds, present a chronological survey of Xi'an's history from prehistoric settlement through the Tang dynasty, using artifacts excavated within the modern city, including ceramics, tomb figurines, and Buddhist statuary recovered from sites now built over by the contemporary city. A dedicated hall displays Buddhist sculpture connected to Jianfu Temple's monastic history, complementing the pagoda outside. The grounds combine the free temple courtyard and pagoda base with the reservation-only museum galleries, so visitors can view the pagoda from the surrounding park without necessarily touring the indoor collection. Conservation work has focused on stabilizing the pagoda's earthquake-era crack and the surviving Ming and Qing temple halls around it, rather than restoring the pagoda to a reconstructed full height.