After enjoying the ‘green’ wide open spaces of Inner Mongolia, I braced myself before cycling into Ningxia, which had the reputation for being one of China’s poorest places. According to the Asian Development Bank, the small autonomous region for Hui Muslims had high levels of deprivation in rural areas due to harsh environment, geographical isolation and lack of development.
Crossing the border from Inner Mongolia, I certainly noticed a difference. After cycling the bridge over beautiful Wuhai Lake, the road took me down into a grim polluted landscape of what looked like gas works, power stations and chemical plants, crisscrossed by railway lines and truck-laden highways.
The road to the next city, Shizuishan (石嘴山), was a continuous parade of industrial complexes and I dreaded to think what kind of toxic waste might be being dumped into the Yellow River, which was now on my left. There were also a few power stations and coking plants on my right hand side, and their ugly chimneys and pipes were an incongruous contrast to the sublime beauty of the brown rocky crags of the Helan mountains (贺兰山) behind them.
The Helan mountain range was a natural barrier to the Tengger desert beyond, and has recently gained a reputation for being an ideal area for wine production. Ningxia wines are the rising stars of China’s winemaking industry, although given the industrial context it did not surprise me to learn that one of the vineyards had been developed by the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, Sinopec.
After almost two months on the road I was becoming a bit jaded and felt I was turning into a kind of pedalling automaton. The lacklustre industrial landscape depressed me, so that by the time I reached Shizuishan I had little enthusiasm to continue any further. The town had tried to emulate nearby Wuhai with an artificial lake and parklands at its centre, but I bypassed it to try find a decent hotel.
In such a small and obscure town the only place in Shizuishan that would accept a booking from a foreigner was a homestay that was located down a small alleyway. There was no response when I knocked on the locked door. I rang the number listed on the booking site, to be told by the female owner that it was ‘unattended’ room and I should let myself in with the combination that she read out to me over the phone. After a lot of fiddling about I managed to get the door open, to find a spartan bedsit room. After a quick trip to do some shopping and have an early dinner, I was too worried about getting the combination wrong and being locked in or out to close the door again. I propped it open all night and made an early ‘check out’ the next morning.
My destination for the day was Yinchuan (银川), capital city of the “Hui Muslim Autonomous Region”. Despite the name, only about a third of the region’s population were Hui Muslim and the proportion was even less in Yinchuan. Nevertheless, in the ‘Muslim district’ of Yinchuan there was a distinctly Islamic and central Asian atmosphere around the street markets selling flat breads, teas and sweet fruits. The Hui Muslims are ethnically similar to the Han and differ only in wearing the taqiyah-style small white cap. Some women wore the hijab, while others wore a smaller embroidered cloth turban to cover their hair.
I stopped to have beef noodles at a Muslim restaurant opposite one of the most important mosques in Yinchuan. Despite being marked on my map I had trouble locating the Xiguan Mosque (西关清真寺) because it had been ‘sinicised’. In photographs from 2019 the mosque was located in an open square, had a green dome and was flanked by two large minaret towers, also with green domes. When I eventually located it in 2025, I found the mosque had been shorn of the dome and towers, leaving it as a small boxy structure with a flat roof. It was also now hidden down a long driveway behind large locked gates.
The Hui Muslims of China had not been the subject of the harsh crackdown that had been imposed by Beijing on the Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang, but the government had certainly wanted to show them who was the boss. The sinification of mosques was ostensibly to eradicate ‘foreign influence’ because the minarets and other Middle Eastern aspects of mosques rebuilt in the 1990s were judged to be too Arabic - and therefore symbols of possible Wahhabi-style fundamentalism. Similarly, the Arabic script for ‘halal’ حلال was banned and replaced with the Chinese characters qingzhen 清真.
But I hadn’t come to Yinchuan to see its recent Muslim history, rather to see the remnants of a much older ethnic community - the Tanguts - who had once controlled the region and been a culture to rival those of the Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongols.
In the 11th century Yinchuan had been the capital of the Tangut empire, which covered much of northwest China between Tibet and Mongolia. Now all that remained of the Tanguts were a few heavily-eroded loess earth structures that were once the ornate tombs of their kings, which the Chinese called the Xi (Western) Xia mausoleum (西夏王陵). Cycling out to the west of the city for an hour, I found a collection of large and small pyramid-like stumps of earth protruding out of the desert plain against the backdrop of the Helan mountains.
These beehive-like structures and surrounding walls were remains of five tombs built between the eleventh and thirteenth century by a warrior kingdom called the Tanguts. They were of Tibeto-Burman origin and believed to have originated from the Tibetan borderlands with Sichuan. The Tangut clans were skilful warriors using cavalry, chariots and archery to expand their influence and power and take control of key parts of the Silk Road trade route around present day Gansu, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia. They sometimes fought with neighbouring groups of Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs, and at other times allied with them to fight against the Han Chinese dynasties.
By the 11th century the Tangut armies numbered 300,000 warriors and they had built a prosperous regional kingdom centred around Yinchuan. They developed their own language and art, music and architecture, and a civil service modelled on the Chinese imperial system.
But the reign of the Tanguts and the existence of their kingdom came to an abrupt end in the year 1227 when they became the next victims of the burgeoning Mongol empire after Genghis Khan’s conquest of China.
The Tanguts had initially co-operated with the Mongol tribes to fight the Han Chinese, but when the Tanguts refused to be subsumed to Genghis authority, he sent his ruthless cavalry armies west and vanquished the Tanguts in a series of campaigns. In the brutal and uncompromising style that would become the hallmark of the Mongol hordes, Genghis Khan ordered the slaughter of all the conquered Tanguts and the systematic eradication of their city and its culture. In this early example of genocide he was successful, and little trace remains of the Tanguts in today’s China.
The Tangut tombs at Yinchuan were neglected until the 1970s but have recently been designated as significant cultural monuments by the government. The vast site containing the mausoleums has now been developed for tourism and the mounds can be viewed from a distance from access roads served by shuttle buses from the nearby visitor centre. Displays in the centre’s Xixia museum show how the tombs once looked, with the packed-earth ‘beehives’ actually being the core of octagonal-shaped squat pagodas that had multi-tiered roofs and overhanging eaves.
The few Tanguts who survived the massacres of Genghis Khan’s armies fled the area to settle in neighbouring regions such as Henan and Sichuan. In the intervening years the diaspora assimilated with local populations, and the Tanguts ceased to exist as a ethnic group.
After finishing my visit, I took off on my bike back to find my hotel in Yinchuan. It was run by a Hui Muslim family and I wasn’t sure they would be happy with me bringing alcohol back to my room. I’d wanted to try one of the many local Ningxia wines, but that would have to wait until another time.
The next day I found myself cycling alongside the Yellow River again as I passed through the town of Wuzhong (吴忠). The river here was brown and fast flowing, having just emerged from Ningxia’s claim to have a "Grand Canyon of the Yellow River”. After following the newly-built cycle track along the riverbank I arrived at another specially built tourist village at a dam complex at the head of the Qingtong Gorge (青铜峡).
The focus here was on the riverside terraces that held 108 Buddhist stupas (一百零八塔, Yibailingba Ta). The brown coloured stupas were arranged in pyramid shape in 12 layers culminating in a small temple at the top of the hillside site. I took a detour from the highway to see the site, but decided against taking the boat trip that went beyond the dam, further up the river into the canyon. This was the edge of the loess country that marked the border between the desert and the Hetao plain, and I expected to see a bit more of it over the next few days on my way to Lanzhou.
The road took me westward alongside a railway track to Zhongwei (中卫), the last city before I would have to tackle the loess hill wilderness in earnest. The landscape became one of craggy brown cliffs to the north, and the weather was now warmer and I had to shed my jacket for the first time since Inner Mongolia. I bypassed the county town of Zhongning (中宁), on the south bank of the Yellow River and just stopped at a truckstop assortment of buildings along the highway to get some beef noodles from a Muslim restaurant.
When I eventually arrived in Zhongwei it had an unusual end-of-the-line feeling to it. This was where the major highway moved away from following the Yellow River, which meandered through a series of remote canyons among the loess hills on its way from Gansu. While there were settlements along the river, there were no roads connecting them. After my diversion away from the roadless part of the river in Shanxi, this would be the next major part of my journey where the Yellow River could not be followed by bicycle.
To get to Lanzhou my options were to either take the long anticlockwise route along a highway through the Tengger desert that ran about 10-20 kilometres distance from the river, or to take a more direct route south through the loess hills staying at small towns along the way. This route would recross the Yellow River about 70 kilometres further south and then run in parallel with it but at a distance of about 10 kilometres. Whichever option I took, I would not be seeing much of the river until I arrived in Lanzhou a week later.
Traditionally, Zhongwei had been just a train station on the main line from Lanzhou to Inner Mongolia. It was a fertile strip of land along the river where visitors could now ride camels along sand dunes on the edge of town, at the former desert reclamation research centre of Shapotou (沙坡头). I found a hotel next to the Gaomiao Temple (高庙保安寺), which offered a unique and unusual combination of Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian icons.
In the basement there was a ‘chamber of horrors’ with a labyrinth of passageways leading to chambers that featured garishly-lit scenes of hell. Accompanied by a soundtrack of wailing and moaning, the figures in each room were engaged in acts of torture such as burning people at the stake, sawing them in half, or pulling out their tongues with large tongs.
Other scenes depicted prisoners in chains begging for clemency before a celestial judge and skeletons being left to rot in dungeons. It was quite a relief to emerge back into the fresh air and daylight above ground, to seek out a benign bit of dinner.
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