Gansu
Gansu is the Silk Road corridor: a thousand-kilometre passage between mountains and desert, strung with oasis towns, rainbow rock formations and the greatest Buddhist cave art on earth at Dunhuang’s Mogao Caves.
Places to visit
LandmarkJiayuguan Fort
Jiayuguan is where the Great Wall ends: the westernmost fortress of the Ming line, built in 1372 to guard the narrowest point of the Hexi Corridor between the…
NatureMingsha Mountain & Crescent Lake
Crescent Lake is the desert postcard made real: a moon-shaped spring that has survived for two thousand years in a hollow of the Mingsha “singing sand” dunes,…
MuseumMogao Caves
Dug into a desert cliff outside Dunhuang between the 4th and 14th centuries, the Mogao Caves hold roughly 45,000 square metres of Buddhist wall paintings and…
NatureZhangye Danxia
The Rainbow Mountains of Zhangye are 24 million years of mineral sediment tilted on end and sanded smooth by desert wind — ridges striped in rust, cream, ochre…