<\/span>Three Thousand Years of Bathing: The History<\/span><\/h2>\nThe story starts long before the Tang. The hot springs at the foot of Mount Li are the only natural hot springs anywhere near Xi’an, which is why every dynasty wanted them. By the Western Zhou, more than three thousand years ago, they were already famous enough to feature in one of China’s best-known cautionary tales: it was on this very mountain that King You of Zhou lit the beacon fires as a joke to amuse his concubine Baosi, crying wolf at the nobles who were supposed to come to his defence. When real invaders finally arrived, no one came, and the dynasty fell. Legend also has it that Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, met a goddess at the spring and built a palace over it; a Han emperor later expanded the grounds.<\/p>\n
The golden age came under the Tang. Emperor Xuanzong, who reigned from 712 to 756, rebuilt the site on a grand scale and renamed it Huaqing Palace in 747, at the height of the dynasty’s long prosperity. Every winter he moved his entire court here to escape the northern cold, because the spring water rises at around 43\u00b0C \u2014 perfect for bathing even in February. And he brought with him Yang Guifei, the famously beautiful consort whose bathtub was the small, crabapple-shaped pool known as the Haitang Tang. Bai Juyi’s poem “Song of Everlasting Regret” (809) preserved the scene forever: “On a chill spring day she was granted a bath in the Huaqing Pool; the warm spring waters slid over her creamy skin.” The love story ended in catastrophe: when the An Lushan Rebellion broke out in 755, Xuanzong fled the capital, his own escort forced Yang Guifei to die at Mawei Slope, and the palace was sacked and burned. Only the poem, and later the ruins, remained.<\/p>\n
For more than a thousand years the site slumbered as farmland and orchards. Then, in 1936, history crashed back into it. Chiang Kai-shek had taken up residence in the Five-Pillars Hall at Huaqing Palace while pressing his campaign against the communists. At dawn on 12 December 1936, soldiers under the generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng surrounded the compound to force him into an anti-Japanese united front. Chiang slipped out through a window \u2014 still pointed out to visitors today \u2014 and scrambled up the rocky hillside in his nightclothes, hiding in a narrow crevice near the summit until he was found. The pavilion that now marks the spot is called Bingjian Ting, the “Pavilion of the Military Admonition”. The Xi’an Incident, as it is known, was the event that finally made the united front against Japan possible.<\/p>\n
The Tang bathing pools themselves were rediscovered by archaeologists in 1982, buried for over a millennium. Today the site is a very Chinese double act: a love story and a coup d’\u00e9tat sharing one walled garden, with hot water still running beneath the flagstones.<\/p>\n
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