6-Day Ningxia South: Yinchuan, the Xumishan Grottoes and Liupan Mountain

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 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 - south
The road south from Yinchuan runs up onto the loess plateau, and the country changes: the irrigated plain gives way to dry gullies, terraced slopes and small towns strung along the valley floors. This is the poorer half of Ningxia, and the southern mountains - the Liupan range - are the source of the rivers that water the north.

The Xumishan Grottoes
Xumishan is a red sandstone bluff about fifty kilometres north-west of Guyuan, and it has been cut with cave temples since the Northern Wei, in the fifth and sixth centuries, with the main work continuing through the Tang and Song. More than a hundred caves survive across eight terraces, and the site is one of the major Buddhist cave complexes of north-west China - never as famous as Dunhuang or Yungang, and all the better for it.

The centrepiece is the great Tang Buddha of cave 5: a seated figure of Maitreya nearly twenty metres high, cut into the cliff and standing in the open after the front of its cave collapsed in an earthquake, so that you come around a corner and find him in daylight, with nothing between you and the rock. The surrounding caves hold painted clay figures, a Song-era bodhisattva, and inscriptions that record who paid for what. Your guide walks you up the terraces and explains the sequence, and how the site survived - it was spared in the Cultural Revolution largely because the local people refused to let it be destroyed.

Lunch
Lunch at a restaurant near the site. Southern Ningxia cooking leans toward mutton, potatoes and coarse grains; the local speciality is a buckwheat noodle served cold with vinegar and chilli oil.

Afternoon and evening
Continue to Guyuan, the principal town of the south, and check in. If time allows, the small Guyuan museum holds a remarkable collection of Silk Road material excavated locally, including a Northern Zhou tomb with its painted coffin. Dinner in the town.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at the best available hotel in Guyuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the pass
The Liupan range runs north to south across the south of Ningxia, and the pass over it has been on the road between the Wei River valley and the Hexi corridor since the Han dynasty. The name means six coils, after the switchbacks; the modern road still uses them, and the old track can be walked in places.

What makes Liupan different from the rest of Ningxia is water. The range catches the last of the monsoon coming up from the south-east, and the slopes are covered in secondary forest - birch, larch, oak, pine - with a richness of plant life that is unusual this far north-west. It is ten degrees cooler than Yinchuan in summer, and the clouds sit on the trees.

The Long March memorial
In October 1935 the Red Army crossed the Liupan pass on the Long March, and Mao Zedong wrote a poem about it that became one of the best known in modern Chinese literature. The memorial on the pass is a museum and a viewing platform, and it is worth an hour for the sake of understanding how the Long March is remembered in this part of the country - the villagers here still point out the routes.

Lunch
Lunch at a farmhouse on the mountain, where the trout come from cold ponds fed by the streams and the vegetables are grown in the terraced plots. This is the one part of Ningxia where you eat river fish rather than lamb.

Afternoon
The afternoon is a walk in the forest reserve - an easy loop on boardwalks and forest roads, with the guide identifying what is flowering. In late September the larch turns and the whole slope goes yellow. On the way back to Guyuan, stop at any of the small Hui villages along the road, where the houses are built around a courtyard and the mosque minaret is the tallest thing in sight.

Evening
Dinner in Guyuan.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at the best available hotel in Guyuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - north again
The drive back to Yinchuan takes four and a half hours with stops, and the country is worth watching: the loess terraces of the south give way to the irrigated plain, and the Helan Mountains come up on the left as you approach the city.

Stops on the way
There are two worth building in. The first is one of the Hui villages along the road, where the houses are built around a courtyard and the local bread is baked in a communal oven - the guide will ask before stopping anywhere, because these are people's homes. The second is Tongxin, where the great mosque of 1573 stands above the town: a large, low, brick-and-timber building with a tiered roof in the Chinese manner rather than a dome, which is one of the clearest pieces of evidence that Islam in China took Chinese architectural form.

Lunch
Lunch on the road - a bowl of lamb noodles at a roadside restaurant, or something better if the timing works.

Afternoon - departure
You reach Yinchuan in the mid-afternoon, and the vehicle goes straight to the airport or the railway station, or to a hotel if a day room has been booked. The guide walks you in as far as the entry check.

Meals
Lunch

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