5-Day Ningxia and the Yanchi Frontier: Ming Walls, a Salt Lake and the Best Lamb in China

Morning - arrival
Yinchuan sits on the flat plain between the Helan Mountains and the Yellow River, at about 1,100 metres, and it is the greenest city for a thousand kilometres in any direction. That is not a natural accident: the plain is irrigated by a canal system that was dug under the Han dynasty and has been maintained, on and off, for two thousand years. Your guide meets you at the airport or the railway station and drives you into the city.

The Ningxia Museum
The provincial museum is the right place to start, because it explains what you are about to look at. The collection runs from the Palaeolithic sites of Shuidonggou through the Tang and Song into the Western Xia - the Tangut kingdom that ruled here from 1038 until the Mongols extinguished it in 1227 - and out along the Silk Road. The Western Xia galleries hold Buddhist sutras, Tangut script, seals, ceramics and the stonework recovered from the imperial tombs, and there is a fine collection of the carved stone steles that the Tangut left behind. Admission is free and pre-booking is required; your guide handles it.

Lunch
Ningxia cooking is Hui cooking: lamb above all, noodles, and a restrained hand with chilli. Your guide orders hand-grabbed mutton, a bowl of lamb soup with pulled noodles, and a plate of the local cold vegetable dishes. A mild table is arranged alongside.

Afternoon - Haibao Pagoda
North of the old city, in a walled courtyard of its own, stands the Haibao Pagoda - a square brick tower of eleven storeys, about fifty-four metres tall, tapering slightly as it rises, with arched niches on each face and no eaves at all. Its present form is a Qing reconstruction of a much older building, traditionally dated to the fifth century, and it is one of the oldest structures standing in the city. The climb to the top platform is steep and narrow and gives you the whole of Yinchuan: the plain, the canals, the mountains closing the western horizon.

Evening
Dinner at a local restaurant. If you have the energy, the guide can walk you through the drum tower area afterwards, which is livelier after dark than it looks by day.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the tomb field
Thirty-five kilometres west of the city, where the plain runs into the foot of the Helan Mountains, is a burial ground of fifty-odd square kilometres holding nine imperial tombs and more than two hundred subsidiary burials. The Western Xia was a Tangut state that held this ground, together with much of modern Gansu and northern Shaanxi, from 1038 to 1227, and it produced its own script, its own coinage and a Buddhist culture that looked west to Tibet as much as east to the Song.

What survives is largely earth: rammed walls, the octagonal cores of the burial mounds, and the long spirit roads running toward the mountains. Seen from a distance the mounds read as eroded pyramids, which is where the tourist name comes from. The setting does most of the work - the tombs face east across the plain with the mountain wall behind them, and the light in the late afternoon turns the whole field amber.

The site museum
The museum at the entrance is the other half of the visit, and it is a good one: Tangut script, Buddhist printing, armour, the gilt bronze ox and the stone horses that came out of the tombs, and a reconstruction of the burial chambers. A short film sets out what is known and - more interestingly - what is not. No Tangut royal tomb has been opened intact, and the architecture of the mounds has never been satisfactorily explained.

Lunch
Lunch at a farmhouse restaurant near the site, where the lamb comes from the surrounding villages and the vegetables are grown against the mountain. Mild options and vegetarian dishes are arranged in advance.

Afternoon
After the museum, the vehicle takes you along the foot of the mountains to the twin tombs at the northern end of the field, where the two mounds stand close together and the crowds do not reach. On the way back, if the group wants it, the guide can stop at a winery on the eastern foothills - this is the same strip of gravel and sunshine that produces most of China's best red wine - for a tasting before dinner.

Evening
Dinner in Yinchuan.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - Zhenbeibao
Zhenbeibao is two Ming-dynasty garrison towns, Ming City and Qing City, built of rammed earth on the old road north. By the twentieth century they were ruins, and in 1961 a writer called Zhang Xianliang, then living as a political prisoner nearby, noticed them. Twenty years later he turned them into a film set, and they became the location for a run of films that defined the Chinese art-house cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, including Red Sorghum and A Chinese Odyssey.

What you walk through now is a working set left standing: mud-brick lanes, gate towers, a reconstructed old Yinchuan street, props, and film crews shooting around you if you are lucky. It is unashamedly a tourist attraction and it is also genuinely strange - a fake town inside a ruined real one, in a landscape that looks like the surface of another planet.

Lunch
Lunch at a restaurant between the two sites, on the mountain road. The local speciality is lamb cooked in a clay pot with dried chillies; a mild version is ordered separately.

Afternoon - the Helan Mountain rock art
The Helan range runs north to south for two hundred kilometres and forms the western wall of the Yinchuan plain. In its eastern gullies, where water runs off the mountain after rain, there are thousands of carvings cut into the dark varnish of the rock face, made between roughly three thousand and ten thousand years ago by pastoralists and hunters working the foothills.

The images are mostly animals - deer, sheep, horses, camels, wolves, tigers - with human figures, hands, and a group of mask-like faces that are usually read as spirit or deity images; the largest of these, the so-called sun god, has become the emblem of the site. A boardwalk and a small museum run along the main gully, and the walk is easy. Your guide explains how the carvings were dated, and why the same motifs recur across the whole of northern Asia.

Evening
Return to Yinchuan for dinner. In September and early October the guide can stop at a foothill winery on the way back for the harvest.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the wall
Yanchi sits in the dry north-east corner of Ningxia, against the Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia borders. The Ming Great Wall runs across it in long straight stretches, built of rammed earth and faced with brick only at the gates; four hundred years of wind have taken the brick and left a low, wide ridge that you can walk along for kilometres with nothing else in sight.

This is the wall as it actually is for most of its length - not restored, not a monument, just a line in the grass that once divided an empire from the steppe. Your guide walks you along a section near the county town, explains how the rammed-earth method works and why it survives in a dry climate, and points out the beacon platforms spaced along the ridge.

The salt lake
Yanchi means salt pond, and the county has produced salt since the Han dynasty: the lake here was one of the great salt sources of the north-west, and the trade in it financed a good part of the region's history. The lake is a strange, bright, salty place, ringed with white crust, and the old salt works are still standing.

Lunch
Lunch is the reason to come. Yanchi tan sheep are a breed raised on the saline grass of the steppe, and the meat is famously the tenderest and least gamey in China - it was a tribute item under the Qing. The local way is hand-grabbed mutton, boiled with almost nothing, eaten with salt and garlic. If the group would rather not eat lamb, the restaurant does a good potato and noodle dish.

Afternoon
The afternoon is the old county town, the wall park and the steppe beyond it. In summer the grassland here is open and empty, and the light in the late afternoon is very good.

Evening
Return to Yinchuan for dinner and the night.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - at leisure
The morning is left free. Depending on the departure time there is room for a last walk in the old city, for the Ningxia Museum if you did not see it on the first day, or simply for a slow breakfast and re-packing. Your guide confirms the departure time the evening before and builds the morning around it.

Transfer out
Hedong International Airport lies about twenty kilometres south-east of the city, on the far side of the Yellow River; allow forty minutes. Yinchuan railway station is on the western edge of the city, twenty minutes from the centre, and runs high-speed services to Xi'an, Lanzhou and Beijing. A vehicle and driver take you and your luggage straight to the terminal, and the guide walks you in as far as the entry check.

Onward
If your flight leaves late, a half-day of sightseeing can be added before the transfer - the Western Xia tombs or the Helan Mountain rock art are both close to the airport road - and a day room can be kept at the hotel on request.

Meals
Breakfast

Accommodation
No hotel night included - onward flight or train. A further night in Yinchuan can be added on request.