Gansu
Discover Gansu
Introduction
Gansu is a long, narrow province that exists because of a gap. The Hexi Corridor — a thousand-kilometre strip of oases between the Qilian mountains and the Gobi desert — was the only practical route from central China to central Asia, which made this province the Silk Road itself for more than a thousand years.
Everything worth seeing follows that line. At Dunhuang, at the western end, the Mogao Caves hold nearly five hundred grottoes cut into a cliff and painted between the fourth and fourteenth centuries — the largest surviving body of Buddhist art anywhere, and the place where a sealed library of fifty thousand manuscripts was found in 1900. Nearby, the Crescent Lake sits in the dunes of Mingsha Shan. At Jiayuguan the Ming Great Wall ends in a fort on the desert floor, which was the edge of the empire and the point beyond which exiles were sent.
The south of the province is quite different: Tibetan and Hui Muslim, green, and holding Labrang at Xiahe, one of the six great monasteries of the Gelug school and the largest outside Tibet proper. The Zhangye Danxia hills are striped in red, orange and blue-grey rock. Gansu is dry, high and very cold in winter; May to October is the workable season.