After enjoying the nature and 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 a harsh environment, geographical isolation, and lack of development.
Crossing the border from Inner Mongolia, I certainly noticed a difference. After cycling across the long bridge over beautiful Wuhai Lake, the road took me down into a grim and untidy industrial 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 massive industrial facilities, 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 in its post-industrial transformation efforts with an artificial lake and parklands at its centre, but I bypassed it to try to find a decent hotel.
In this small and remote town, the only place in Shizuishan that would accept an online booking from a foreigner was a homestay that I had difficulty finding, hidden down a small side alleyway. Worryingly, there was no response when I knocked on the door. It took a very stressful and frustrating half an hour of phone calls to locate the owner and to learn that this was an ‘unattended’ room accessible by a combination code. I could not understand the numbers she read out to me over the phone in a thick accent and had to get the neighbours to take over the call and tap in the combination . code. After this, I was too worried about being locked out (or in) again, so I left the door propped ajar all night. I propped it open all the time until I made an early ‘check out’ the next morning.
My destination for the next day was the lost city of Irqai and the ‘Pyramids of China’. But unlike the fabled western lost city of Atlantis, this city had been very real. It had been the capital of the Tanguts, a people whose civilisation and culture have now disappeared after they were conquered by Genghis Khan’s army in an early example of ‘cultural genocide’.
Yinchuan (银川) is today the 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 city. Nevertheless, in the ‘Muslim district’ of Yinchuan, there was a distinctly Islamic and Central Asian atmosphere around the street markets selling flatbreads, teas, and sweet fruits. Many men were wearing the taqiyah-style small white cap, and some women wore the hijab while others wore a smaller embroidered cloth turban to cover their hair.
On arriving in the city centre, I had difficulty finding one of the most important Muslim sites in Yinchuan, the Xiguan Mosque (西关清真寺). It was marked clearly on my map but I cycled past it twice without recognising it because the exterior facade had been ‘sinicised’. The mosque’s two large minaret towers and green domes had been removed since the last photographs were taken in 2019.
In 2025, I found the mosque had been remodelled to give it a minimalist and bland exterior, preserving the basic structure but with a flat roof and no hint of Middle Eastern architectural styling. The mosque’s former open square had also been walled off, making it accessible only via a 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 relatively recent Muslim history, rather to see the remnants of a much older community— the Tanguts. They were an ethnic group of about two million people who had once ruled the region and whose state had a flourishing civilisation and culture to rival those of the neighbouring Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongols.
In the 11th century, Yinchuan had been ‘Irqai’, the capital of the Tangut empire, which covered much of northwest China between Tibet and Mongolia.
The Tanguts were of Tibeto-Burman origin and believed to have descended from Qiang people who migrated from the Tibetan borderlands with Sichuan. The Tangut clans were skilful warriors and traders, and took 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, art, music, and architecture, and a civil service, some of it modelled on the Han Chinese imperial system, some of it derived from their Tibetan forebears in Lhasa.
But the reign of the Tanguts and the existence of their kingdom came to an abrupt end in the 13th century. After Genghis Khan had united the Mongol tribes and sought to expand, he looked south for their first conquest towards the prosperous and vulnerable Tangut territory along the Yellow River. He first invaded in the year 1210, and subjugated the Tanguts after laying siege to their cities. Fifteen years later when the Tanguts reneged on ‘paying tribute’ to the Mongols, Genghis Khan decided to exact a terrible and final punishment on them.
His mobile cavalry armies went through to the Helan mountains and defeated the Tanguts in a series of campaigns that culminated in a winter battle on the banks of the frozen Yellow River near Yinchuan (then known in Chinese as Zhongxing).
At this time on his deathbed, Genghis Khan ordered the slaughter of all the conquered Tanguts and the systematic eradication of their city and culture. His sons and heirs carried out a systematic and brutal campaign of destruction that would become a model strategy for the Mongol cavalry tactics when they later expanded across Asia, Persia and into Europe. Most Tanguts were killed or enslaved and little trace remains of the Tanguts in today’s China.
Now all that remains of the Tanguts near Yinchuan are a few heavily eroded loess earth ‘pyramid’ structures that were once the ornate tombs of their emperors, and which now comprise the Xi (Western) Xia mausoleum (西夏王陵).
Cycling out to the west of the city for an hour, I came to a collection of large and small triangular piles 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 the Tanguts.
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.
After finishing my visit, I rode back on my bike to find my hotel in the city. Like Wuhai, Yinchuan had a new and rapidly expanding wine industry, and I’d wanted to try one of the local Cabernet Sauvignons from the vineyards along the eastern foothills of the Helan Mountains. Here was another paradox: one of China’s most Islamic regions was now developing a wine industry. My hotel was run by a Hui Muslim family, and I wasn’t sure they would be happy with me bringing alcohol back to my room, so the Ningxia wine sampling would have to wait until another opportunity.
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| Wuhai to Yinchuan (click on image to enlarge) |
The ground around the river here is made of unstable silty sediment, and the surge in river water was enough to engulf Lingzhou and all its inhabitants. The city was rebuilt with levees and water diversion channels but was destroyed twice more by changes in the course of the river.
When I cycled along the river bank I could see the waters were still silty and fast-flowing, having just emerged from the Qingtong Gorge, 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 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 an empty expanse of 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.
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 rooms that featured garishly-lit scenes in which purple and pink human figures are being subject to imaginative and cruel ‘torments of hell’. Each horrific ‘torture’ scene was designed as a stark visual warning to visitors about the karmic retribution consequences of a specific type of immoral behaviour.
People who lied, gossiped, or slandered are shown having their tongues cut out. Those shown being burned at the stake were guilty of being unfilial or abusive. People who were corrupt, greedy or bullied the poor are shown being cut in half, having their eyes gouged out, or being crushed by a millstone. All accompanied by a soundtrack of wailing and moaning.
“A person's actions throughout their life are recorded in hell, inscribed in iron books and stored under the supervision of Judge Cui Jie … “ the explanatory sign said. “Those who committed many evils in life will have their souls taken to Yama, the King of Hell, for judgment and punishment at the time of their death.”
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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| Yinchuan to Zhongwei (click on image to enlarge) |
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