China Guide
The Northwest
Gansu
A harsh and barren land, the geography of Gansu province is remarkable – from the great Yellow River, dense with silt, surging through the provincial capital of Lanzhou, to the deserts of the Hexi Corridor, a thousand-kilometre route between mountain ranges. It's also a region of enormous historical interest. The Mogao Caves at Dunhuang house the finest examples of Buddhist art in all China, and there are stunning Buddhist caves at Bingling Si, near Lanzhou. The Great Wall, snaking its way west, comes to a symbolic end at the Jiayuguan fortress, and, right on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, is the fascinating Labrang Monastery at Xiahe.
It's the Hexi Corridor that accounts for the curious dumbbell shape of the province: the Silk Road caravans funnelled this way, the Great Wall was built here, and today's trains chug along here as well, along what was – until the Qinghai– Lhasa railway was completed – the only link through Central Asia between China and the West. The towns along the Hexi Corridor are mere dots of life in the desert, sustained by irrigation using water from the mountains.Given that agriculture is barely sustainable here, central government has tried to import a certain amount of industry into the province, particularly in the east. The exploitation of mineral deposits, including oil and coal, was a tentative beginning, quickly followed by Mao's paranoid "Third Line" industrial development in the 1960s, when factories were built in remote areas to save them from possible Soviet attack. But still the population is relatively small, comprising just 26 million, who continue to display an extraordinary ethnic mix, with Hui, Kazakhs, Mongols and Tibetans all featuring prominently.