Chapter 22. Seeking a Plan B in Xining 青海湖 - 刘家峡

 It had taken me eight difficult days pedalling uphill from Lanzhou to get to Qinghai Lake, but it took only two days to return to near Lanzhou,  freewheeling much of the way back downhill again along the main highway. 

I would lose almost 2000 metres in altitude when I descended from the lake towards Xining, aiming for the Lijiaxia reservoir outside Lanzhou, where I had passed through on the way up. This would be my gateway into Gansu towards the first bend of the Yellow River. 

My journey back down started on the dual carriageway alongside Qinghai Lake. It was a long, flat ride along the shoreline until I left behind the amusement rides and entered an ethnic Tibetan truckstop town of Daotanghe (倒淌河). From here it was a short but nerve-wracking ride to Sun Moon Mountain (日月山, Riyueshan) along a modern highway that had no shoulder on which I could avoid the passing cars and trucks. 

Sun Moon Mountain was a significant landmark in Chinese folklore, marking the ‘end of the world’ or at least the western edge of the Chinese world. In the flat-earth beliefs of ancient China, it was believed that travelling beyond this point would take you to an otherworld place where the sun and moon went after they set. The ‘mountain’ was actually a couple of relatively low, grassy mounds on top of which were pavilions dedicated to the sun and moon, respectively. 

It was said that in the year 641 during the Tang dynasty, the minor royal Princess Wencheng (文成公主) paused here to summon up courage before leaving China to go into Tibet. She had been sent by the Tang Emperor from her home in Chang’an (Xi’an) to Lhasa to be married to the Tibetan ruler, King Songsten Gampo, in a diplomatic alliance-building gesture.

According to legend, the Princess Wencheng possessed a magic mirror given to her by the Emperor which he told her would show her family and homeland if she looked into it. Feeling homesick as she prepared to depart from China for the last time at this spot, the princess looked into the mirror and felt desperately sad when she saw in the reflection an image of Chang'an. Torn between duty to country and yearning for home and family, the princess is said to have thrown the mirror away in heartbreak and despair, vowing to ‘never look back’. 

The fallen mirror broke into two fragments, one reflecting the sun and one reflecting the moon, and these were said to have become the twin Sun-Moon hills that we see at the pass today and give it its name. The story around these two hills is said to embody values such as personal sacrifice, duty over personal desire and the great leap of crossing a border from one world to another.

In the late spring of 2025, Sun-Moon Mountain was a beautiful spot set amid green grass-covered mountains, but it was swarming with tourists whose cars and coaches clogged the access road from the motorway. Since I had made such fast progress, I abandoned my plans to stay here for the night and pushed on towards Xining. 

he road from here onwards turned downhill, and remained that way for much of the way back to the big city, making me realise how much altitude I had gained in the last few days. With little pedalling to do and only light traffic on the road back from the plateau, I could relax a little on my two wheels and listen to music on my earbuds. 

This pleasant downhill journey was interrupted by a thunderstorm on the road approaching Xining, with a sudden onslaught of heavy rain that forced me to stop and shelter under a railway bridge for 20 minutes. The outskirts of the city were a jarring reintroduction to the modern Chinese world: there were Disneyland-like entertainment complexes whose garish hotels were adorned with dolphin marine-themed sculptures. 

Around another bend in the road, I came upon a real estate development that had been modelled on European architecture: one apartment block was built in the style of an English church with a spire, another was like a terrace of Amsterdam canal-side houses and even had its own windmill. Moving through to the parkland of the Xining suburbs, I enjoyed the luxury of a separated lane for cyclists, although I had to share it with picnicking motorists who set up barbecue stoves on the path and sat around under tent canopies they had strung from tree branches.

Once across the sprawling city centre, I made for the youth hostel where I’d stayed on a previous visit to Xining more than a decade ago. At that time, the hostel had been a lively and sociable place run by a woman who had returned from studying in Europe. She had understood the tastes of Western backpackers and ‘eco-tourists’ interested in Tibetan culture. Sadly, with the decline of the western backpacker market in China, the hostel had become just an empty shell, with little of the vibrancy of its former existence. I was the only guest and spent the evening sat alone in the deserted lounge that felt neglected and cold.

The one place I wanted to revisit in Xining was its grand Donguan Mosque (东关清真寺). In 2012, I had photographed its porticoed facade flanked by a couple of four-tiered minarets and topped with a bulbous green dome. I barely recognised the same mosque in light of its sinicisation. In 2025, I discovered that like its smaller counterpart in Yinchuan it had undergone major building work to decapitate the minarets, which were now clock towers. The Arabic-style dome had been replaced by a sloping roof that might have been taken from the Forbidden City

I recalled the fake church that I had just seen in the suburbs of Xining: it seemed acceptable in China to have architecture that emulated foreign places of worship so long as it was for real estate development rather than religious purposes.

The next day the road back towards Lanzhou provided another epic day of downhill cycling. I barely needed the e-bike’s battery assistance as I pedalled through a series of ‘new town’ developments in places like Ping’an (平安) and Haidong (海东). The high-tech factories, shopping malls, and neatly manicured gardens of gated communities were all in line with China’s vision of ‘high-quality development’ for the 21st century. But to the casual visitor like me, they were a bit dull.

I had the high-speed rail line alongside me for much of the way to Minhe (民和), and had to start pedalling again and using up the battery power. I knew there would be some uphill sections beyond the town, so I stopped to charge the battery at a friendly Muslim restaurant.

There was more open country and spectacular scenery when I crossed into Gansu from Qinghai beyond Minhe, with the road passing through the mountains via several tunnels. A tributary of the Yellow River flowed on my left, and I seemed to slow down as I looked for signs of the major turnoff towards Liujiaxia. There was now a lot of traffic on the road coming out of Lanzhou, and I had to contend with heavy trucks bearing down on me as they used the oncoming lane to overtake slower counterparts.

It was 5pm when I reached the turnoff for Liujiaxia, and I was tired and saddle sore after a long day on the bike. The side road to Liujiaxia looked like a lonely and badly maintained route and I was tempted to keep cycling on the main highway to reach the big city  ‘civilisation’ of Lanzhou just a few kilometres away.  I wanted to stop and put my feet up and have a beer, but reluctantly, like Princess Wencheng at Sun-Moon Mountain, I decided to press on and ‘never look back’. I thought it would be a relatively easy 30 kilometres and towards Liujiaxia. 

It actually took me another two hours of difficult pedalling to get there. I’d misunderstood the map and only realised at the last minute that the ‘direct’ road actually went over some high mountains and involved a lot of up and down. I opted instead to follow a longer route that ran alongside the Yellow River, which added another 15 kilometres to my pedalling. I assumed it would be level, but it wasn’t.  

I was a very exhausted and unhappy rider when I eventually rounded the final curve of the river for a 12-kilometre final stretch past riverside glamping sites and picnic tables to arrive in the town of Yongjing, just in time to be soaked by another heavy thunderstorm. 

 This time I headed straight for the posher Fumen hotel that I had envied from a distance on my first visit. It was indeed an excellent choice, especially for a bedraggled, road-weary and thoroughly wet cyclist who had covered a staggering 350 kilometres in two days.

Route: Qinghai Lake to Liujiaxia via Xining (click on image to enlarge)