5-Day Yinchuan In Depth: the Tombs, Shahu Lake, Shuidonggou and the Old City

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 - the lake
Shahu lies about fifty kilometres north of Yinchuan, on the edge of the Yinchuan plain where the irrigation water pools before the ground rises toward the Ordos. It is an odd, beautiful place: some forty-five square kilometres of open water and reed marsh, with sand dunes running straight down into the eastern shore, so that you can stand in one spot and look at reeds, water and desert in a single sweep.

A boat takes you out through the reed channels. The reeds stand three to four metres high and the channels are cut through them, so the passage is close and green, opening without warning onto open water. This is the best part of the day and worth taking slowly.

Birds
The wetland sits on the East Asian-Australasian flyway and is a stopover for migratory waterbirds; more than two hundred species have been recorded, and the reserve is a protected breeding site for several of them. Spring and autumn passage is the richest, but herons, egrets, grebes and reed warblers are present through the season, and the lake holds a resident population of the rare Relict Gull in winter. Bring binoculars if you have them; the guide carries a scope.

Lunch
Lunch at a lakeside restaurant, and the fish is the reason to eat here: the lake is stocked with bighead and grass carp, and the local method is to steam the whole fish with scallion and ginger. A mild table is arranged alongside.

Afternoon
The afternoon is on the dune shore and the boardwalks on the eastern side, where the sand meets the water and the walking is easy. Camel rides, sand sledding and a small bird park are on offer at the entrance area; all of these are optional and payable on the spot. If the group would rather have a quiet hour, the northern shore has benches and shade and no one on it.

Evening
Return to Yinchuan for dinner.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

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

Morning - the Palaeolithic site
Shuidonggou sits in a dry gully about twenty kilometres east of Yinchuan, where a small river cuts through the loess. In 1923 two French Jesuits, Emile Licent and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, excavated here and found stone tools alongside the bones of extinct animals, and the site entered the literature as one of the first Palaeolithic localities identified in China. The assemblages are around thirty thousand years old and include blade technology that has been argued over ever since - whether it arrived from the Altai and Siberia, or was invented locally.

The site museum sets this out clearly, and the excavated sections are protected under a shelter you can walk through. What makes Shuidonggou unusual is that the same valley then keeps going: you walk out of the Stone Age and straight into the Ming frontier.

The Great Wall and the fort
A stretch of the Ming wall runs across the top of the gully here, built of rammed earth rather than stone, which is why it reads as a long low ridge rather than a wall - the desert has been eating it for four hundred years. Beside it stands a garrison fort, and below the wall a set of tunnels, the so-called Hidden Troops Cave, cut by hand through the loess and used as a magazine and a shelter. The tunnels are low, cool and genuinely dark; the route through them is a few hundred metres and involves steps and crouching.

Lunch
Lunch at the site restaurant - lamb, noodles, and the local cold dishes. A mild table is arranged in advance.

Afternoon
The rest of the valley is walked at an easy pace: the red lake, the canyon walls, and the sections of wall that nobody visits. The site runs transport between the sections, which is included in the entrance ticket; the walking between them is short. Your guide keeps the group ahead of the tour buses, which arrive in the middle of the day.

Evening
Return to Yinchuan. Dinner in the city; the guide can take you to the night market near the railway station if you want something less formal.

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.