5-Day Yinchuan to Zhongwei: the Western Xia Tombs, Shapotou and the Yellow River

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 plain
The road from Yinchuan to Zhongwei runs south-west along the Yellow River, through the oldest irrigation district in China. This is the Ningxia plain: flat, bright green, cut into rectangles by canals and lined with poplars, with the desert held back on both sides. The canals are the reason the place exists. The Qin and Han both built here, the Tang expanded the system, and the Western Xia emperors irrigated the same fields.

There are two stops worth making on the way: the Bronze Gorge, where the river has cut a channel through the hills, and the Qingtongxia dam area. Your guide will judge the timing; the drive itself is only two and a half hours and there is no need to rush it.

Lunch
Lunch in Zhongwei, at a restaurant near the old town. Zhongwei is known across the province for its saozi noodles - hand-pulled noodles with a thick lamb and vegetable sauce - and for a local vinegar that is sharp enough to be used as a condiment on its own.

Afternoon - the Gaomiao
The Gaomiao is one of the strangest buildings in China and hardly anyone outside the province has heard of it. It began in the Ming dynasty as a small Buddhist shrine and grew, over three hundred years, into a single structure nearly thirty metres high in which Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist halls are stacked on top of each other, accessed by staircases that climb through the building in the dark. The plan is a compressed cross; the upper storeys are carried on a timber frame with almost no visible support; and the roofscape, seen from the courtyard, is a dense thicket of eaves, ridges and glazed figures.

You climb it. The staircases are narrow, the passages are low, and the whole thing creaks. From the top you look over the old town roofs to the Yellow River and, beyond it, the first line of dunes.

Evening
Dinner in Zhongwei. Overnight in the city, within reach of the desert for tomorrow.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

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

Morning - the dune wall
Shapotou is a bend in the Yellow River where the Tengger desert, which runs north into Inner Mongolia, comes down to the water in a wall of dunes about a hundred metres high. The river here is wide, slow and green, running between sand on one side and the black rock of the gorge on the other. It is the single most photographed place in Ningxia and it earns it.

The morning is for the desert side. You climb the dune face - on foot, or by the sand escalator the site installed, or on a chairlift - and then the sand sledding runs come down the slope at a speed that is genuinely surprising. Camel trains work the ridge line above. All activities are optional and paid on the spot; your guide will tell you honestly which ones are worth the money.

The straw grids
The reason Shapotou is famous in China has nothing to do with tourism. In the 1950s the railway from Baotou to Lanzhou was being buried by the advancing dune field several times a year, and a group of engineers and local workers solved it with straw: one-metre squares of wheat or rice straw pressed into the sand in a checkerboard, which holds the surface still long enough for grass to establish. The technique, known as the straw checkerboard, was subsequently exported to desert-control projects across northern China and Africa. You can see the grids and the vegetation they carry on the flat ground behind the dunes, and the guide will show you how they are laid.

Lunch
Lunch at a restaurant in the scenic area. Yellow River carp is the local dish; the guide orders it steamed, with a lamb dish and vegetables alongside.

Afternoon - the river
The afternoon is on the water side: the sheepskin raft, which is eight or ten inflated goatskins lashed to a frame and steered by one man with a pole, is the traditional craft of this reach of the river and still works. The gorge walk above the river is quiet and gives you the whole bend. Those who want more adrenaline can take the zip line across the river; those who do not can sit under the trees.

Evening
Dinner and overnight in Zhongwei, or - if the group prefers - in one of the desert camps beyond the dunes, where the sky after dark is the point.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Zhongwei, twin share, with daily breakfast. A desert camp or desert hotel can be substituted on request.

Morning - at leisure
The morning is free. If the flight is late and the group wants one more thing, the old town and the Gaomiao are ten minutes away and easily fitted in before the transfer.

Transfer out
Zhongwei Shapotou Airport is small, nine kilometres from the centre, and serves a handful of domestic routes; allow twenty minutes and check in early, because the terminal is not built for volume. Zhongwei South railway station, on the Yinchuan-Lanzhou high-speed line, is twenty-five minutes from the centre, with trains to Yinchuan in about an hour and a half and to Lanzhou in about three.

Alternative - return to Yinchuan
If your onward flight leaves from Yinchuan Hedong, the drive back takes about two and a half hours and can be timed to your departure; the guide will build the morning around it, with a stop on the way if there is time.

Meals
Breakfast

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