Gansu Region Guide

Gansu is the corridor — a long, narrow province threaded between deserts and mountains that carried the Silk Road out of China, and almost everything worth seeing here follows that line.

The Mogao Caves at Dunhuang are the great destination: 492 caves cut into a desert cliff over a thousand years, painted with some 45,000 square metres of Buddhist murals and holding a sealed library whose contents rewrote the history of Central Asia when it was opened in 1900.

Jiayuguan is where the Ming Great Wall ends, a fort in the desert that marked the edge of China proper — to be sent beyond it was exile.

At Zhangye, sedimentary rock has been folded and eroded into hills banded in red, orange and green.

And at Xiahe, Labrang is one of the six great Gelugpa monasteries, with a three-kilometre circuit of prayer wheels.

Dunhuang

The Mogao Caves, booked ahead, seen in a guided group of eight or so caves from a rotating selection with a torch. Then the Mingsha singing sand dunes on the edge of town with Crescent Lake, a spring-fed crescent of water that has survived among the dunes for two thousand years, and the Yumen and Yangguan passes out in the desert, where the Han wall runs as eroded ramparts of tamped earth and reed.

The corridor

Jiayuguan’s fort, the western terminus of the Ming wall, with a stretch of wall running to a cliff edge. Zhangye for the Danxia landforms — sandstone and mudstone laid down in bands and then tilted, eroded into ridges striped in ochre, rust and green — and for a reclining Buddha 35 metres long inside a Song temple.

Tibetan Gansu

Labrang Monastery at Xiahe, one of the six great Gelugpa institutions, with several thousand monks historically and a kora circuit of over a thousand prayer wheels. The Sangke grasslands beyond it.

Lanzhou

The Yellow River runs through the city, and the province’s museum holds the bronze Flying Horse. The Bingling Thousand Buddha caves are reached by boat.

Gansu is a meeting place rather than a heartland, and its culture is the product of everything that passed through.

The corridor

The Hexi corridor is a gap between mountains and desert roughly a thousand kilometres long and in places only a few dozen wide. Everything moving between China and Central Asia went through it: Buddhism, paper, silk, horses, armies and ideas. The province is a string of oasis towns along that line, and its identity is about transit.

Many peoples

Gansu is among the most ethnically mixed provinces. Hui Muslims are a substantial population, particularly around Linxia, which is sometimes called China’s little Mecca; Tibetans dominate the south around Xiahe; and the Dongxiang, Yugur and Bonan peoples exist almost nowhere else. The Yugur speak a Turkic language and practise Tibetan Buddhism, which is an unusual combination.

Buddhist transmission

Buddhism entered China along this corridor, and the cave complexes at Mogao, Maijishan and Bingling record its arrival, adaptation and flowering in painting and sculpture across a thousand years.

Poverty and distance

Gansu has long been one of China’s poorest provinces, and the out-migration of young people is a visible fact in the smaller towns.

The Mogao Caves are extremely fragile. Humidity and carbon dioxide from visitors damage the pigment, so numbers are capped, visits are timed and guided, only a rotating selection of caves is open, and photography is prohibited inside. Book well in advance through the official site — tickets sell out in peak season — and accept the restrictions as the reason the paintings still exist.

Water is the province’s fundamental constraint. This is one of the driest inhabited parts of China, the oases depend on shrinking glacier-fed rivers, and Minqin county has been fighting to avoid being swallowed by two advancing deserts for decades.

Tibetan areas around Xiahe and in the south have periodic access restrictions and real political sensitivity. Check current rules, be discreet, and use Tibetan-run guesthouses.

Desert camps at Dunhuang: stay on established routes, and do not ride camels at operators whose animals look poorly kept.

Buy nothing presented as an antiquity from the Silk Road sites.

May to October is the season. The corridor is comfortable, the passes are open, and the grasslands in the south are green from June.

September and early October are the best weeks: warm days, cold nights, clear desert light and the poplars turning gold at the oases.

July and August are hot in the corridor, above 35°C at Dunhuang, and are the peak domestic season — Mogao tickets sell out and the dunes are crowded.

November to April is cold, with the corridor well below freezing and the southern grasslands severe. Several sites reduce hours, and the desert is bitter. It is also empty, and the caves are much easier to see properly.

Monlam, the Tibetan Great Prayer Festival at Labrang in February or March, is the most remarkable thing in the province’s calendar.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the region

Gansu is among the cheapest Chinese provinces. Mogao entry is the one substantial fixed cost and is worth every yuan.