9-Day Ningxia Grand Circuit: Yinchuan, Shahu, the Wine Country, the Tengger and Zhongwei

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 - why here
The eastern foot of the Helan Mountains sits between 37 and 39 degrees north, at about 1,100 metres, on a series of gravel fans that the mountain has shed onto the plain over millennia. The growing season is hot and dry, with three hundred days of sun, a large diurnal swing, and almost no rain during ripening - which means disease pressure is low and the fruit arrives clean. The mountain also shelters the strip from the worst of the north-west wind. It is, by common consent among Chinese winemakers, the best red-wine ground in the country.

The district is young. The first serious estates were planted in the 1990s and the quality jump came after 2010; today there are more than two hundred producers, and Helan Mountain wines have taken medals and high scores in international competition with increasing regularity. Cabernet Gernischt - Carmenere - is the local signature grape, alongside Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah and Marselan.

The first estate
The morning is at a mid-sized working estate: the vineyard rows on the gravel, the gravity-fed winery, the barrel hall. You walk the vines with someone from the winemaking team rather than a tour guide, and taste through the range - a white, the entry red, and one or two of the reserve wines. This is the part people remember: the wines are good, and the setting, with the mountain directly behind the trellis, is not like any other wine region.

Lunch
Lunch at the estate restaurant, cooked to go with the wine - lamb, mushrooms, root vegetables, and the local bread. A non-drinking option is available for anyone driving or abstaining.

Afternoon - the second estate
The afternoon is at a second, larger property with a different philosophy - a chateau-scale building, a formal cellar door, a wider range including a sweet wine and a sparkling. The two visits together are the point: they show you that this is not a curiosity but an industry with arguments inside it.

Evening
Return to Yinchuan for dinner. Wine can be bought at the estates and carried; the guide will help with packing for the flight.

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 - off the road
The Tengger runs north from Zhongwei into Inner Mongolia and covers some thirty-six thousand square kilometres, which makes it the fourth-largest desert in China. It is not the empty sea of sand that the word suggests: the interior holds a chain of more than four hundred small lakes fed by groundwater, fringed with reed and grass, and it is these basins that the tracks run between.

You go in by four-wheel drive, and the driving is the experience: over the dune crests, down the slip faces, along the hard-packed corridors between them. The drivers work this ground daily and the vehicles are prepared for it. Stops are frequent, because the light changes and because there is no reason to hurry.

The lakes
The lakes come as a surprise. Some are fresh and clear, some are salt and rimmed with white; all of them carry birds and most carry a few camels. You stop at two or three of them across the day, walk the shore, and eat lunch in the shade of whatever is available.

Lunch
A packed lunch in the desert, or a simple meal at one of the lake-side guesthouses if the schedule allows. The guide carries water and shade for the group.

Afternoon and evening - the camp
You reach the camp in the late afternoon, in time to climb a dune and watch the sun go down across the sand. Dinner is at the camp - lamb, noodles, and whatever the camp kitchen is doing that day - and after it the lights go off. Zhongwei has one of the darkest skies in eastern China, and on a clear night the Milky Way is a band you can see the structure in. Your guide knows the constellations visible at this latitude and will point out what is up.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight in a desert camp or desert hotel in the Tengger, twin share. Camps here range from tented rooms with private bathrooms to simple yurts; the grade is confirmed at the time of booking.

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.