Great Mosque of Xi'an
— the minaret built as a pagoda.
Not only on a wall.
“Down a lane behind the Drum Tower, five courtyards open one inside the next. The minaret reads as a pagoda; the prayer hall faces west under a tiled Chinese roof. Hui families have prayed here since the Tang. Late afternoon light comes through the wooden screens slow, the way it does in old temples that are not temples.
Great Mosque of Xi'an, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Great Mosque of Xi'an stands on Huajue Lane, in the Muslim Quarter (Beiyuanmen) of Xi'an, Shaanxi Province. It was founded in 742 CE during the Tang dynasty under Emperor Xuanzong, when the city was the imperial capital Chang'an. Most of the buildings standing today date from the Ming and Qing periods, across reconstructions from the 14th through the 18th century. The complex covers roughly 12,000 square metres across five successive courtyards on an east-west axis. It was designated a National Key Cultural Relic Protection Unit in 1988 and is among the largest active mosques in China.
The five courtyards drop the noise of the food street as soon as the first gate closes behind you. Wooden screens, stone steles inscribed in Arabic and Chinese, and the pagoda-form minaret known as the Examining-the-Heart Tower (Xingxin Lou) mark a slower pace than the city around them. Calligraphy attributed to the Ming scholar Mi Wanzhong, dated 1605, hangs in one of the side halls. The dominant sound is footfall on stone and, at the appointed hours, the muezzin call carried softly from a covered pavilion rather than from a high tower.
The mosque opens daily to non-Muslim visitors outside prayer hours, typically from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., with the prayer hall itself closed to visitors and viewable through the doorway. The site lies a five-minute walk from the Drum Tower on Huajue Lane, reached through the food stalls of Beiyuanmen Muslim Street. Friday prayers draw the largest gathering and serve Xi'an's Hui Muslim community, estimated above 50,000. Photography is permitted in the courtyards but not inside the prayer space. Entry fees in 2026 are 25 yuan in low season and 40 yuan from April through October.