As part of our two day visit to Xi’an we visited the City Wall, we enjoyed our morning stroll along the walls (it was a pity it had been raining, but one can hire bikes and ride the wall in dry weather). The girls particularly liked hearing all about the Archery Tower – which provided security to one of the four gates of the Xi’an wall. Created as a large trap-like chamber, capped by a tower filled with windows, it gave an advantageous position for archers to shoot arrows (in the initial years of building the wall) and later cannonballs at the opposing revolutionary forces. In the event that the enemy was able to breach the walls through the main gate they would become trapped in the small chamber that faced yet another gate and thus be easy targets for the defending troops.
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