You stand at the eastern end of the Silk Road, in the greatest city on earth — no city anywhere holds more people in this age. A wall of rammed earth runs some thirty li around a vast grid of dead-straight avenues and walled wards, so broad that a man may lose a morning crossing from one gate to the next; northward rise the tiled roofs of the palace city, and eight years of war have thinned the crowds without humbling the scale of the place.

The Western Market 西市

Around you spreads the market itself — two whole wards given over to trade, loud with Persian jewellers and Sogdian wine-shops and the bawling of camel-copers, and a pen of beasts that have come exactly as far as you have. The war has shuttered whole rows of it and the foreign quarter is thinner than the songs remember, but here your jade and musk and lapis find their buyers, and a thin market rewards a bold hand. Where do your feet take you?