Xi'an builds hub for modern 'Silk Road'

Ancient city is to play a bigger role in international trade

The 3,300 year-old-city of Xi'an is perched on the tip of China's loess highlands. Its surrounding yellow earth was the source material for the city's world-famous terracotta soldiers, an army of statues built in 200BC to guard China's first emperor in the afterlife.

The yellow earth was once seen as a symbol. Back in the 1980s, when many Chinese were still not confident about the nation's economic rise, it was seen to represent isolation from the rest of the world and slow change. The bright development was blue, near the ocean and the coastal cities built on foreign investment and exports.

But critics asked if such a divide was necessary. Must yellow earth and blue ocean be symbols of two totally different economies and living conditions?

Don't forget, they argued, that the city of Xi'an was not only the center of some of the powerful ancient empires in world history, but also the key eastern destination and supply hub for the Silk Road, the once-flourishing international trade route across the Eurasian continent.

From the first century BC to the 800s, before the world knew such seaports as Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong or Shanghai, Xi'an - called Chang'an back then - was one of the largest commercial ports in the world.

Merchants speaking various languages gathered in its inns, trading gems from Afghanistan, glassware from Europe, fruit and spices from Persia, in return for the local products, most famously silk and chinaware.

One difference from the modern times was that the shipments that Xi'an sent away were carried on the camel back, instead of by ships.

As a natural linkage between the eastern and western parts of China, and between China and its western neighbors, indeed, why can't Xi'an regain its past commercial glory along with China's rise in economic prowess, in the age of globalization?

It can. With all modernized land and air transportation conveniences, it can help China better serve its partners in Central Asia and develop alternative modes of trade with entire Europe.

Thus a daring, although not entirely unfamiliar, concept was proposed by the local economists: Xi'an should build itself into a port-on-land.

It should be like the Port of Shanghai, to become a modernized hub for China's west-bound trade by land transportation.

It should, once again, be a host of merchants from "ten thousand countries", as it was described poetically in ancient times, although they don't have to come to city leading their caravans.

An inland port? English teachers from local universities scratched their head, as Han Song, deputy mayor of Xi'an recalled, when they were asked by the municipal government to translate the name of the concept.

"In the end, we decided to give it a straightforward English name, just to call it Xi'an International Trade and Logistics Park."

In ITL's early days, Han said, skepticism abounded as a city like Xi'an, which is some 1,300 kilometers away from Shanghai, 1,200 kilometers from Qingdao (a northern China port city) and 1,100 kilometers away from Beijing and Tianjin, can play such a key role in the country's foreign trade and logistics service industry.