Ancient city is to play a bigger role in international trade, Ed Zhang reports.

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.