10-Day Dunhuang Silk Road Deep Trade Study Tour

Morning — Arrival and Transfer
Your guide and driver greet you at Xi'an Xianyang International Airport and transfer you by private vehicle to your hotel. The morning is kept light so you can recover from the overnight flight.

Afternoon — Welcome Briefing
A short briefing at the hotel sets the context for the days ahead: how Xi'an moved from the eastern terminus of the Silk Road to a modern industrial and logistics hub, and what the enterprise visits on this programme will show you.

Evening — Welcome Dinner
A welcome dinner introduces the group and the local hosts. Shaanxi cooking is the vehicle: cold noodles, lamb, and the wheat-based dishes that define the Guanzhong plain.

Meals
Breakfast, Dinner included.

Morning — Terracotta Warriors and Standardisation
At the terracotta museum, study how Qin's unification of weights, measures and written script lowered the cost of trade across an empire, and how that foundation made the later Silk Road conceivable.

Afternoon — Great Tang West Market Museum
The Great Tang West Market Museum stands on the original site of Chang'an's international marketplace, where Sogdian, Persian and Central Asian merchants traded tea, silk, spices and gems. It is the closest thing to standing inside the Silk Road's balance sheet.

Evening — Muslim Quarter Dinner
Dinner in the Muslim Quarter, still a living descendant of that trading world.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — Maijishan Grottoes
The cliff galleries of Maijishan: 194 caves and more than 7,000 clay sculptures strung along plank walkways eighty metres up. The site pairs naturally with any conversation about craft standardisation — the same modelling workshop supplied the whole cliff for six centuries.

Afternoon — Equipment Manufacturing Enterprise
An afternoon visit to a Tianshui equipment manufacturing enterprise — the city is a significant base for electrical apparatus and machine tools. The visit covers the production lines, quality control and a briefing with plant management on the practicalities of inland-China manufacturing today.

Evening — Dinner with Local Hosts
Dinner with local hosts. Tianshui's cuisine leans to the sour-and-spicy; the cold guagua and the sour soup noodles close the day.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — Lanzhou New Area
A briefing in the Lanzhou New Area, the state-level development zone that has shifted the city's centre of gravity north. The session covers the incentive framework, logistics corridors and what the New Area means for companies using Lanzhou as a western-China base.

Afternoon — Enterprise Visit
An afternoon inside a petrochemical or pharmaceutical enterprise. Lanzhou's industrial base grew around the refinery commissioned in the 1950s; today the sector spans catalysts, fine chemicals and pharma. The visit walks the production line and closes with a management exchange.

Evening — Chamber of Commerce Dinner
A dinner hosted with members of the Lanzhou Chamber of Commerce — a working evening of introductions along the Belt and Road corridor, over Gansu lamb and Yellow River fish.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — The International Land Port
Visit the Lanzhou International Land Port, the rail terminal where China-Europe freight trains are marshalled. The briefing covers volumes, transit times to Europe and Central Asia, bonded-zone rules and where Singaporean logistics and trading houses already plug into the chain.

Afternoon — The Gansu Provincial Museum
The museum's Silk Road hall holds the bronze Flying Horse of Gansu — the image on China's earliest tourism mark — alongside camel caravans in three colours and the bamboo slips of Han couriers. Two thousand years of corridor trade in one room.

Evening — Sunset on the First Bridge
Finish on the Zhongshan Bridge at sunset, when the river turns gold under the white-pagoda hill.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.

Morning — The Journey to the Oasis
Travel to Dunhuang by high-speed rail or flight as the programme schedules. The desert crossing sets the frame: this is the corridor every caravan threaded between the Qilian snows and the Gobi.

Afternoon — Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake
Check in, then head out before the heat drops: climb the Mingsha dunes — the singing sands that give the mountain its name — and find Crescent Lake, the spring that has outlived two thousand years of encroaching sand, with its Han-era pagoda on the bank.

Evening — Welcome Dinner
A welcome dinner in the oasis — Dunhuang lamb, Liangzhou noodles, apricots and the dates the oasis is famous for. Tomorrow belongs to Mogao.

Meals
Breakfast, Dinner included.

Morning — The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas
A full morning at Mogao with a dedicated guide: the Tang meditation cave with its alpine landscape mural, the flying apsaras of the Western Wei, the commissioned donor portraits that run down the walls like a ledger of Silk Road trade. Entry is timed and capped; the morning is structured around the scheduled cave openings.

Afternoon — Conservation and the Dunhuang Museum
After lunch, the exhibition centre's replica caves and the story of the Library Cave — the manuscript hoard Stein and Pelliot carried off, and the digitisation programme that is now returning it to the world. Then the Dunhuang Museum's Silk Road galleries in town.

Evening — A Silk Road Dinner
A themed dinner that walks the corridor in courses — lamb, apricot wine, camel-milk toffee — and closes the day's study.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — The Road to Jiayuguan
Transfer from Dunhuang to Jiayuguan, about two and a half hours along the edge of the Gobi, the Qilian snow-line on the right for the whole drive.

Afternoon — Cultural Creative Industry
Visit a Jiayuguan cultural-creative enterprise — the companies that turn the fortress, the Great Wall and the desert into product: licensed merchandise, immersive exhibitions, destination marketing. The exchange focuses on how heritage IP is actually monetised at a frontier city scale.

Evening — Farewell Dinner
A farewell dinner in Jiayuguan — the last evening on the corridor before tomorrow's return to Xi'an.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — Jiayuguan Pass
Walk the fortress: the three-storey gate towers, the outer wall gripping the gorge between the snow mountains and the desert, the rampart that runs up the Black Mountain. This is where the Ming empire decided the world ended.

Afternoon — The Flight East
Transfer to Jiayuguan Airport for the flight back to Xi'an. The corridor runs backwards under the wing — oasis, gravel plain, loess, and finally the green Guanzhong plain.

Evening — A Final Evening in Xi'an
Land, check in, and take a final free evening in Xi'an — the Muslim Quarter for a last bowl of paomo, or an early night before the morning flight home.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — At Leisure
A free morning for meetings, packing or a final walk. Your guide remains available for anything arranged at short notice.

Afternoon — Transfer to the Airport
Your private vehicle transfers you to Xi'an Xianyang International Airport.

Evening — Departure
Check in for your onward flight and bring the programme to a close.

Meals
Breakfast included.