The Great Mosque in Xian is the largest and best preserved of the early mosques of China. It is considered to have existed as early as the seventh century. The mosque what we can see today, however, was begun in 1392 during the Ming Dynasty. Since the fourteenth century, the mosque has undergone numerous reconstructions. Most of the buildings extant today are from the Ming and Qing Dynasties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.