12-Day Silk Road Trade & Negotiation Leadership Camp

Morning/Afternoon — Arrival & Hotel Check-in
A tour bus transfers you from the airport or railway station, and you check into your hotel in the Qujiang or High-tech District. These areas sit close to the city's cultural tourism hubs, with recommended options near Da Tang Pedestrian Street. Your guide will assist with check-in and brief you on the days ahead.

Afternoon — Lunch & Free Time
Lunch is served at your hotel, followed by free time to explore the hotel surroundings. You may stroll in the nearby Qujiang Pool Ruins Park or familiarize yourself with the area around Da Tang Eternal City.

Evening — Da Tang Eternal City (17:30–20:00)
Take an evening stroll along Da Tang Eternal City, a 2.1-kilometer pedestrian boulevard themed around the prosperity of the Tang dynasty and lined with elaborate light installations, sculptures, and street performances. You can experience immersive Tang Dynasty performances such as 'Secret Box of the Great Tang' and 'Unmovable Beauty', and optionally rent Tang Dynasty costumes for photos. The 'Chang'an 12 Hours' themed block is also nearby.

Night — Dinner at a Local Restaurant
Dinner is arranged at a local restaurant to close the day.

Meals
Breakfast at the hotel; lunch at the hotel; dinner at a local restaurant.

Accommodation
Check in at a hotel in the Qujiang or High-tech District.

Morning — the market that was the route's eastern end
Chang'an under the Tang was the largest planned city in the world, laid out on a grid of 108 wards inside walls ten kilometres around. Two of those wards were markets, and the West Market is the one that mattered: excavations since the 1950s have uncovered streets up to sixteen metres wide, the foundations of shops and warehouses, coins from Byzantium and Persia, and a cross carved on a stone in a way that suggests a Nestorian chapel stood among the merchants' stalls. Chinese sources record tens of thousands of foreign residents in the city, including Sogdians from Samarkand who ran much of the long-distance trade, and Tang officials who had to keep the accounts.

Late morning — what actually moved, and which way
The second session is a commodity briefing. Westward went silk, lacquerware, ceramics from the southern kilns, tea, and - decisively - papermaking, which reached the Islamic world after the Battle of Talas in 751 and Europe centuries after that. Eastward came horses, glass, wool, cotton, grape vines, pomegranates, walnuts, sandalwood, and silver. The trade was not a caravan going all the way from Chang'an to Rome; it was a relay of middle-distance merchants who handed goods on at oasis towns, and the price rose at every hand. Participants are given an inventory, a set of route costs and a list of risks - banditry, drought, a bad crossing of the Taklamakan - and are told how much capital they have.

Lunch
A lunch of the kind the market sold: lamb, flatbread, noodles and grapes, with the guide explaining which of the ingredients came in along the route rather than out of Shaanxi.

Afternoon — the Great Mosque and the Muslim quarter
The afternoon walks the quarter around the Great Mosque, founded in 742 and rebuilt in the Ming period, with its Chinese courtyard plan and its Arabic inscriptions. This part of Xi'an has been continuously Muslim for more than twelve hundred years and is the most legible surviving evidence of the trade the group is studying: a community that came along the route and stayed. Participants conduct short interviews on camera and on paper - shopkeepers, restaurant owners, a calligrapher - and are asked to record what they sell, where the goods come from and who their customers are.

Evening — briefing and role assignment
Over dinner the negotiation is set up. Teams draw roles - Sogdian merchants, a Tang customs office, a caravan financier, a Chinese silk wholesaler, a guild of camel drivers - and each receives a confidential brief with its interests, its constraints and the price at which it must fail. Nobody sees the others' briefs. The first round is tomorrow morning.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Xi'an.

Morning — Fly to Xi'an & Shaanxi History Museum
Fly to Xi'an, the ancient capital that served as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road for over 2,000 years. On arrival, visit the Shaanxi History Museum to understand how the city connected China with the world, facilitating the trade of silk, spices, ideas, and technologies. The exhibits reveal Xi'an's role as a cosmopolitan center where East met West — parallels that resonate today.

Afternoon — Muslim Quarter
Explore the Muslim Quarter, a vibrant neighborhood that has preserved traditions dating back to the Tang Dynasty, when Xi'an welcomed merchants from across Asia and the Middle East. Navigate narrow alleys filled with aromatic food stalls, craftspeople, and historic mosques, experiencing the multicultural heritage that made Xi'an one of the world's most sophisticated cities during its golden age.

Evening — Ancient City Wall Light Show
Watch the spectacular Ancient City Wall Light Show from a rooftop restaurant, where projections bring the city's long history to life on the fortifications that still encircle the old city. As you enjoy local specialties such as biangbiang noodles and roujiamo, consider how Xi'an's past as a trading hub informs its present role in the Belt and Road Initiative.

Accommodation
• 4-Star Hotels: Crowne Plaza Xi'an, DoubleTree by Hilton Xi'an, Mercure Xi'an Downtown. • 5-Star Hotels: The Ritz-Carlton Xi'an, InterContinental Xi'an, Sofitel Legend Xi'an.

Meals
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are included today.

Morning — round one: positions
The first round is deliberately positional. Each team states what it wants - a price, a delivery date, a guarantee against loss - and nobody has enough information to reach agreement. Teams are scored not on the deal but on how much accurate information they extracted: what the other side's deadline is, what it cannot do, and which of the goods on the table it is willing to substitute. Most teams spend the round arguing about the price of silk and never discover who the financier is and what he needs.

Late morning — the framework, briefly
Between rounds, the coach introduces the two frameworks the exercise is built on: the separation of positions from interests, and the difference between a negotiation with a written contract and one with a customer who will still be there next season. Both are old. The Turfan and Dunhuang documents include ninth- and tenth-century contracts for the sale of slaves, the lease of land, the loan of grain and the hire of camels, with penalty clauses, guarantors and a list of witnesses - which is to say that this trade had law, not just trust, and that the law was written in three scripts.

Lunch
Lunch with the other teams rather than within teams, which is allowed on purpose: information leaks are part of the exercise and the coach records who gives what away.

Afternoon — rounds two and three
Round two introduces a shock: a route closure, a bandit report or a currency debasement, depending on the briefs drawn, and every team's constraints change. Round three allows coalitions to be formed, which is where real cross-cultural bargaining appears - a merchant from one team guarantees a loan for another in exchange for a share of the return, and someone has to write it down in language that both sides will accept. All agreements must be recorded in writing, in English, with named obligations, because the audit at the end is a reading of the contracts.

Evening — audit, debrief and a walk on the wall
The audit compares what each team says it secured against what the written agreements actually give it. The gap is the lesson. The debrief then covers the cross-cultural element directly: where teams assumed their counterparts shared their assumptions, and what it cost. Afterwards the group walks a section of the Ming city wall, built from 1370 on the Tang and Yuan foundations, with a circumference of about fourteen kilometres - a suitable place to finish an exercise in bargaining, since the wall was the last piece of the trade route's infrastructure that Chang'an controlled.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Xi'an.

Morning — leaving Chang'an
The route west out of Xi'an has been the same for two thousand years in its broad shape: north-west up the Wei river valley, over the plateau, and then along the narrow strip of habitable land between the Qilian mountains to the south and the Gobi to the north. That strip is the Hexi Corridor, roughly a thousand kilometres long and in places only a few dozen kilometres wide, and every caravan, army, pilgrim and courier between China and Central Asia went through it because there was nowhere else to go. The morning flight covers in an hour what took a caravan two months; the briefing on board covers what the corridor is and why it decided the history of the route.

Early afternoon — arrival in Dunhuang
Dunhuang sits in an oasis at the western end of the corridor, fed by the Dang river coming down from the mountains, with the Taklamakan desert on three sides. It was a Han dynasty garrison town from the second century BC, and it became the point at which the northern and southern routes around the desert met again after splitting at Yumen and Yangguan. The town itself is small and green, with poplar avenues, irrigated fields and a grape industry; the desert starts within a few kilometres. Your guide meets the group at the airport, checks everyone in and gives the afternoon's timings.

Afternoon — the Singing Sand Dunes and Crescent Lake
The Mingsha dunes rise several hundred metres directly outside town, and the Crescent Lake at their foot has been photographed since the Tang. The lake is spring-fed and has been shrinking and refilling for decades, and the site is now managed with a pumped water supply and a strict limit on how far visitors may walk on the sand. You climb the dune ridge for the view over the oasis, which is the clearest possible demonstration of what an oasis is: a green patch defined entirely by water, with sand on every side of it. Camel rides, sand sledding and a night market follow for those who want them.

Evening — dinner and the next day's brief
Dinner in town, then a short briefing on tomorrow's exercise. Teams receive the caravan's inventory and the terms they must negotiate, and are told that the documents they will be working from are real - the Dunhuang and Turfan finds include contracts, loans and camel-hire agreements that are more than a thousand years old, and the exercise is built on their clauses rather than on invented ones.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Dunhuang.

Morning — Mogao Caves
A treasure trove of Buddhist art, the Mogao Caves comprise 492 decorated cave temples holding 45,000 square meters of murals and 2,400 painted statues, with carving at the site beginning in the 4th century and continuing for many centuries afterwards. Guided tours highlight masterpieces such as the Flying Apsaras and explain Dunhuang's role as a spiritual hub on the Silk Road, where travelers and monks passed between China and Central Asia. Because daily access is limited, tickets should be booked well in advance.

Afternoon — Singing Sand Dunes and Crescent Lake
Experience the magic of the Mingsha Shan dunes, where shifting sands are said to create a mysterious singing sound. Ride a camel to the summit for sunset views over the desert, then descend to the crescent-shaped oasis, its spring and pavilions sheltered by towering dunes that have surrounded it for centuries. The changing light at dusk makes this one of the most memorable scenes in Gansu.

Evening — Flexible Evening
After returning from the dunes, the evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Dunhuang.

Meals — Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner
All three meals are included on this day.

Morning — the Jade Gate
Yumen Pass is a rammed-earth square about twenty-five metres on a side, standing alone in open desert roughly ninety kilometres north-west of Dunhuang, with the Han Great Wall running away from it in both directions as a low line of packed earth. It was the western checkpoint of the Han empire from the second century BC, and the name - Jade Gate - records what came through it: jade from Khotan, plus horses, wool, glass and envoys, while silk, lacquer and iron went out. Standing at the gatehouse, the practicalities of a customs post are not hard to reconstruct: a register of who passed, a duty on goods, a limit on what could be exported, and a long ride to the next water.

Late morning — the documents
The exercise uses the Dunhuang manuscripts. A sealed cave library at the Mogao site held tens of thousands of documents from the fourth to the eleventh centuries, walled up around the beginning of the eleventh century and rediscovered in 1900; among them are contracts for the sale and hire of camels, loans of grain at interest, land leases, and a ninth-century agreement for the purchase of a slave, each with witnesses, guarantors and penalty clauses. Teams are given translations of clauses taken from such documents and asked to identify what each clause is protecting against. The answers are always the same: default, delay, death of an animal, and the difficulty of enforcing anything a thousand kilometres from a court.

Lunch
A simple meal taken at a small restaurant on the road between the two passes: noodles, lamb and tea, eaten outdoors when the wind allows.

Afternoon — Yangguan and the renegotiation
At Yangguan, the southern pass, the simulation runs. A caravan has arrived with a shipment short of its manifest, two camels dead, a price that has risen since the contract was signed and a buyer who no longer wants all of it. Every team has one clause it can invoke and one it cannot, and the settlement has to be written down and signed by all parties before the group leaves the site. The coach acts as the frontier official and will refuse any agreement that is not enforceable in the terms available. This is a harder exercise than the Xi'an rounds, because the constraints are historical rather than invented.

Evening — debrief and dinner
Back in Dunhuang for dinner, the debrief asks three questions: which team got the best outcome for its own side, which team got the best outcome for the caravan as a whole, and whether those were the same outcome. The evening finishes at the night market on Shazhou market street, which sells essentially the same categories of goods as the caravan did, including jade and dried fruit.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Dunhuang.

Morning — Yangguan Pass
Yangguan was a Han Dynasty frontier pass where Silk Road traders once presented travel documents to exit toward Central Asia. Reconstructed watchtowers offer sweeping desert vistas over the ancient corridor. The onsite museum displays coins and weapons that evoke the pass's strategic past.

Afternoon — Flexible Afternoon
The afternoon is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Dunhuang, with time to rest or explore the town at your own pace.

Evening — Dunhuang Night Market
As night falls, the Dunhuang Night Market comes alive with local flavors and crafts. Try liangpi (chewy cold noodles with chili sauce) or yangrou paomo (lamb stew with crumbled bread). Stalls sell camel-leather journals, replicas of Mogao murals, and jade trinkets.

Morning — out of the oasis
The line east from Dunhuang runs along the northern edge of the Qilian range, through a landscape that alternates between gravel desert, salt flats and irrigated strips of maize and melon. The names along the way are the old garrison towns of the corridor: Guazhou, Jiayuguan, where the Ming wall ends at a fortress built in 1372, then Zhangye. Watching the sequence from a train window is the best available demonstration of why the corridor worked: water comes off the mountains, a thin band of farmland follows it, and everything outside that band is empty.

Late morning — Zhangye and its reclining Buddha
At Zhangye the group breaks the journey. The town was a major Silk Road junction and its Great Buddha Temple, built in 1098, houses a reclining Buddha of about thirty-five metres carved in clay over a wooden frame, one of the largest in China. The stop is short but the point is worth the detour: this was a place where the route's religions changed hands - Buddhist monasteries, then Nestorian and later Catholic missions, then Islam in the surrounding districts - and the architecture records the sequence.

Lunch
Lunch near the station in Zhangye, or a packed lunch on the train if the connection is tight; the timing depends on the day's service and your guide will confirm it before the trip.

Afternoon — east to the Yellow River
Beyond Zhangye the corridor opens and the terrain turns from desert to loess hills as the line drops towards Lanzhou, where the Yellow River comes down out of the plateau and turns north. Lanzhou has sat at this crossing point for more than two thousand years: it was founded as a county in 86 BC, became a major transit market for the tea and horse trade, and stayed one of the few places where a large river could be crossed on the road west.

Evening — arrival in Lanzhou
Arrival, hotel check-in, and a short walk to the riverside. The Zhongshan Bridge, completed in 1909, was the first permanent road bridge across the Yellow River and is still in use for pedestrians after restoration; the 1957 railway bridge a little upstream was the first rail crossing. Dinner is Lanzhou beef noodles, which is the local dish and costs very little anywhere in the city. Tomorrow's summit exercise is briefed over dinner.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Lanzhou.

Morning — Liujiaxia Reservoir
Drive about 80 km (1.5 hours) to this massive hydroelectric dam on the Yellow River. Cruise the turquoise waters, flanked by red sandstone cliffs that resemble folded silk, and watch for migratory birds such as black-necked cranes. Nearby, explore the Danxia Landform Park, where erosion has sculpted rainbow-hued ridges and pillar formations.

Afternoon — Bingling Temple Grottoes
Accessible by boat from the reservoir and listed on China's UNESCO tentative list, these caves blend Tibetan and Han Buddhist art. Marvel at the 27-meter Maitreya Buddha, carved into a cliff during the Tang Dynasty, and the hundreds of niches and statues cut into the rock. Faded murals depict Avalokitesvara and Silk Road caravans, preserved by the arid climate.

Evening — Return to Lanzhou
Return to the city and dine at Mingde House on Liangpi (cold rice noodles with chili sauce) and Sanpao Tai (steamed pork buns). For an optional evening walk, visit the Zhengning Road Night Market for rose-petal pastries and apricot kernel tea.

Accommodation
Overnight at Legend Hotel Lanzhou.

Morning — preparation
The final exercise is a five-way negotiation over the terms of a single long-distance venture: a financier, two merchants, a carrier and a customs authority, all of whom must sign the same document. Teams return to their roles from Xi'an and Dunhuang, but this time each team is also given one piece of information about another team's bottom line, which forces them to decide what to do with an advantage. The morning is preparation only: drafting, calculating and, inevitably, testing whether a coalition will hold. Coaches circulate but do not advise.

Late morning — position papers
Each team submits a one-page position paper before lunch, in English, setting out what it wants, what it will concede and what it will not. The papers are distributed to everyone, so every team knows the others' public position and can see which private understanding is inconsistent with it. A surprising amount of the afternoon is decided in these twenty minutes of reading, because inconsistency between a paper and a corridor conversation is the most expensive thing in any negotiation.

Lunch
Lanzhou beef noodles at a long-established shop, which is a local institution and takes about twenty minutes to eat.

Afternoon — the summit
The final round runs for three hours with a break. Sealed bids are required for the cargo space, a public register of offers is maintained on a whiteboard, and any team that walks out forfeits its deposit - the rules are explained at the start and enforced without argument. The judge, one of the coaches acting as the customs authority, scores on three criteria: the value agreed, the enforceability of the written contract, and whether the venture could actually have been executed with the resources committed. At the end the document is signed by all five teams, or it is not, and the difference is explained.

Evening — closing presentation and dinner
The summit result is announced with the individual awards - best speaker, best negotiator, most improved - and each participant is given written feedback. Dinner follows in a restaurant above the river, after a walk along the riverside promenade past the Mother of the Yellow River sculpture, which is the most photographed object in the city. The programme ends here; departure arrangements are made the following morning.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Lanzhou.

Morning — Xinglong Mountain National Park
Drive about 45 km (1 hour) to this Taoist sacred site. Hike through spruce forests to Tianqiao Temple, perched on a natural stone bridge, and visit the Dripping Spring, whose mineral-rich water is believed to grant longevity. Look for Taoist carvings of Laozi and the Eight Immortals along the mossy trails.

Afternoon — Lanzhou Waterwheel Expo
Return to the city to see restored Ming and Qing waterwheels that once irrigated the valley. Operate a mini-model using foot pedals and learn about traditional irrigation techniques. You can also shop for souvenirs such as Lanzhou white melon seeds and Gansu lapis lazuli jewelry.

Evening — Departure
Your guide assists with checkout and transfers you to Lanzhou Zhongchuan Airport for your onward journey. If time allows, enjoy a farewell meal of Niangpi (fermented wheat starch jelly) with sesame sauce and Baizi (fried dough twists).