I have a friend, Ah Geng, who kept talking about going all the way to the Sahara for a spring outing. Because of the pandemic, he had to settle for a much more modest version: a spring trip to Shapotou instead.

Shapotou is in Zhongwei. I had business in Yinchuan and took the opportunity to make a side trip to Zhongwei. Out in the desert, I ran into Ah Geng and another friend, Ah Qin. It felt a bit like that moment when Joker meets Tang Sanzang and realizes, oh, you’re here too.

Leaving from Yinchuan and heading south along the Yellow River, Zhongwei is about 200 kilometers away by car. But most of the land along the way is barren, so there’s not much fun in driving it yourself. By comparison, the well-developed rail network between Yinchuan and Zhongwei is easy and efficient.

Tourists usually choose the C-series intercity trains, while the passengers on the old green trains are a much more eclectic mix. Students heading home for the week, locals traveling for work and errands, and travelers from all over the country all gather briefly in the same carriage before continuing on to different corners of the greater Northwest.

If you’re not in a hurry, sitting through a sales pitch in one of those old train cars can actually be pretty entertaining. I have no doubt that conductors from the Beijing Railway Bureau could land comedy jobs right away if they were ever laid off. I’m mostly just curious whether those milk tablets from the Inner Mongolian grasslands have somehow cornered the railway sales channel.

So many northern place names end with words like fort, camp, platform, or village that they conjure up images of armies and horses, and make you hear the line, “I really still want to live another 500 years.” In fact, many of the towns and villages here did grow out of frontier defense and military development.

Tietongbao—just hearing the name makes it sound tightly sealed and reassuringly secure.

A thoroughly ordinary Zhongwei Railway Station.

Desert

Zhongwei’s first keyword is desert.

The Tengger Desert, the fourth largest by area, lies not far from this small city. Fourth is an interesting ranking: not flashy like the top three, but still enough to count when people talk about the big four. It’s the tail end of the first tier and the front-runner of the second, which somehow makes people both forgiving and curious.

And for most families traveling with kids, the Tengger is probably the easiest of China’s major deserts to reach.

Sand and wind are natural masters at sculpting curves. The dunes you see at this moment may disappear overnight.

After driving around the desert a few times, I more or less figured out how things work here. In short: live off the sand, and stake your claim.

The strongest private investors have cordoned off a piece of the desert, built all kinds of attractions and upscale hotels, and even named it directly after the local place name: Shapotou. You can think of it as “Disney in the desert.” Nearby, Alxa’s smaller operations also have some basic entertainment facilities, which you might loosely think of as “desert amusement parks.” As for the places that fence off a patch of sand, throw in a few skinny camels and a beat-up cart, and start charging admission, those are basically just desert farm-stay attractions.

The big operators offer 20% off for five days; the small ones offer 50% off for eight. If you think Shapotou’s admission ticket is too expensive, you can always drive a little farther and pick a smaller scenic area that fits your budget.

Even if you skip the attractions entirely, the desert itself is stunning and beyond reproach.

On the road to Shapotou, after one sharp turn, the entire desert suddenly appears before you without warning. Pull over wherever you like—sunset is best—and whether a woman is wearing red or white, she instantly takes on the aura of Murong Yan or Maggie Cheung in Ashes of Time.

You can also try hiking into the desert and experience what it means when the far side of sand is still more sand.

From a distance, the solar photovoltaic panels look so much like a lake that they can fool the eye. Ningxia has an abundance of blazing sunshine for solar power.

April Pear Blossoms

Another keyword for Zhongwei in April is pear blossoms.

In a village by the Yellow River that had been converted into a cluster of guesthouses, I saw the most beautiful pear tree in bloom that I’d seen all year.

Pear blossoms have a short blooming season too. By early April, they had already begun to fall. One gust of wind would send down a petal.

Perhaps because of the combined effect of the stamens and the leaves, pear blossoms as a whole look mostly green and white. If you’ve seen a lot of the pink and red tones of March cherry and peach blossoms, the shift to green feels a little unexpected.

To laypeople like us, pear blossoms really do look quite a bit like cherry blossoms. The difference is that cherry blossom trees don’t give you cherries, while pear trees most definitely give you real pears.

At one of the guesthouses, visitors were drinking tea and chatting beneath the pear trees, and a line suddenly came to mind: “Amid the sparse shadows of pear blossoms, we talk heart-to-heart till dawn.”

There are pear trees on both banks of the Yellow River, but Zhongwei’s pear blossom tourism is centered mainly on two villages: Beichangtan and Nanchangtan.

On the way to Beichangtan, I unexpectedly stumbled into a truly overhyped tourist trap. As for this unnamed stretch of road marketed as China’s version of Route 66, I have two suggestions: “don’t come,” and “seriously, don’t come.”

Whoever is running Zhongwei tourism is a marketing genius of a very particular kind. On a stretch of road less than half a kilometer long, with a few ups and downs, they stamped a handful of signs resembling America’s Route 66, and that was enough to draw in crowds of tourists and boost business for the uncle selling grilled sausages by the roadside. That kind of packaging skill is like turning an ordinary radish gathering into a grand assembly of heroes.

This was just an ordinary weekend afternoon, and there were already twenty or thirty cars lined up on the road and in the parking area. It’s hard to imagine what holidays are like, when this “Route 66” probably turns into Nanjing Road in an instant. Tourists still have to put on a “totally worth it” smile for their check-in photos, a bit like the moment someone who wears glasses puts them back on after a haircut—internally thinking, “what the hell,” while saying out loud, “it’s fine, it’s fine.”

You drive dozens of kilometers just for a sign like this.

Honestly, you’d be better off looking at the Yellow River, plain and rugged as it is. Within Ningxia, the Yellow River enters right at Nanchangtan Village, and the current is very slow.

Locals keep planting trees along both sides of the Yellow River. I asked one older man how many they planned to plant, and he replied, “As many as it takes to fill the whole place.” It made me think of my own Ant Forest.

Thankfully, there are still a few pear blossom trees left in Beichangtan. These centuries-old pear trees are incredibly imposing—dozens of meters tall, their white blossoms brighter than snow. And this is just one tree; imagine the scene of “a thousand, ten thousand pear trees in bloom.”

The more pear trees there are, the more tour groups show up; and once the tour groups arrive, the crowds are unavoidable. It feels like a paradox. Suddenly I thought: maybe there’s no need to check in everywhere. Wouldn’t it be enough to stay in that little village by the Yellow River and keep watch over that one pear blossom tree?

Beichangtan, like Nanchangtan, is a village tucked into a mountain ravine. In the past, hundreds of households made their living from these pear orchards and jujube groves. Now most have moved away to towns elsewhere, leaving only twenty or thirty households and a large stretch of abandoned homes. A couple of villagers were selling last year’s jujubes by the roadside. I don’t know whether anyone will still be here the next time I visit.

Where to Stay

Zhongwei may not have many big-name hotels, but it definitely has expensive ones.

In the past two years, more and more people have come to know Zhongwei—not just for its desert and pear blossoms, but because of two hotels on the banks of the Yellow River.

The hotel out in the desert is called Desert Star. As mentioned earlier, a well-funded developer built this full-service resort several kilometers deep into the Shapotou desert. The name is a little over the top, but staying in the middle of the desert is genuinely a pretty great experience.

The first time I heard of the concept of a desert hotel was in Wadi Rum, Jordan. Back then, I had planned to stay in the same type of room featured in The Martian, only to end up curled up half the night in a drafty mud house.

Thanks to Ah Geng and A Qin, I had the chance to go inside and look around this time. The design feels like a secret space base hidden in the desert. The hotel has two phases: Phase Two is the star-shaped structure in the photo above, while Phase One is a row of cabins farther away, shown below. The rooms in Phase Two are a bit better.

After walking around the property, it was clear that all the expected facilities are there. Throughout the day, the hotel also schedules activities like desert hikes, sand sliding, and stargazing. A family staying here for one or two nights probably wouldn’t get bored. Based on friends’ feedback, the food and service are decent enough too—although there have been more and more complaints online lately.

As Fake Wuzhen puts it: “Modern tourists finally get a vacation and go somewhere—they’re not traveling to do archaeology. They may love the wild, primitive desert, but first they still want to know whether the WIFI works, and the sheets, bathtub, and toilet definitely can’t be primitive. They may be happy to gallop through swirling dust and sand all day, but back at the hotel they still expect service fit for the Princess of Wales. That’s what travelers really want.”

This hotel does deliver on that front. The indoor hardware is more than adequate. I tried imagining what it would be like to wake up to this in the morning.

At night, once the lights come on, it feels even more like a mysterious base.

The starlit pool is beautiful. In July and August, soaking in the water with the Milky Way overhead and the silent desert all around must be a pretty unforgettable experience.

The catch, of course, is the price. Ah Geng and A Qin bought a Double 11 room package for a little over 1000, including breakfast and dinner, which felt acceptable. Now the hotel is somehow charging 3,000 to 4,000 yuan per night, and it’s completely sold out for the next few months.

I’m not sure whether to marvel at how competitive domestic travel has become, or just repeat that familiar line: “As long as it’s for the kids, no amount of money is too much.”

The other place to stay is in the village with the pear blossom tree across the Yellow River, called Yellow River Suji. Although it’s quite close to Desert Star as the crow flies, the road between them is very indirect, so if you want to stay on both sides of the river over one weekend, it’ll take some extra time.

This, too, was once an abandoned riverside village in a mountain gully, but someone from Wenzhou saw development potential here. People who are good at operations understand the importance of IP: besides investing in one guesthouse himself, he also invited four well-known boutique homestay brands to each take over a courtyard here.

The four brands—Feiniaoji, Dalezhiye, Xipo, and Xuli—each come with their own following. Add in the IP effect of Mango TV’s Dear Inn, and together they turned a deserted village into a buzzy resort destination where room rates can rival Sanya.

Among the five properties, Feiniaoji is the only one that doesn’t use the traditional earthen-house style. Instead, it features container-style rooms designed by Studio QI, in the spot closest to the river.

With Miss Leila backing it, it’s also the most expensive of the bunch.

Appearance-wise, I personally don’t think the design at Yellow River Suji is all that remarkable, though there are some interesting details. By comparison, Nanan is the best-looking property in the compound—understandably so, since it was the Wenzhou owner’s first guesthouse project.

Its signature blue pool, modeled after an Arabic style, helps offset the monotony of all the earth tones.

They even have props prepared, clearly understanding guest psychology and fully embracing their role as a photo-friendly hotel. Some of the scene design really does have a nice finishing touch. On Xiaohongshu, people consistently call it “China’s Morocco.”

Nanan is also the largest guesthouse in the whole village, with two separate courtyards—one centered around a pool, the other around an old tree.

The red couplets at the entrance to Xuli make it feel like a traditional cave-dwelling courtyard in northern Shaanxi, and the large open yard inside is well suited to group activities.

This wall at Dalezhiye left a strong impression on me.

Xipo, on the other hand, left me with no particularly memorable highlights.

There’s a shared café in the village, and the young woman running it was incredibly warm and welcoming. A pear tree in full bloom stands in the little courtyard, and the café also doubles as an art gallery, which gives the place a wonderful atmosphere.

I haven’t stayed at the lodging complex myself, so I can’t really speak to the experience. But unlike the more closed-off Desert Star, you can still enter the village and look around even if you’re not staying here.

The road in is quite rough, though, and along the way you pass several villages that are already half-abandoned. Discarded furniture and empty window frames show that their owners left long ago. Only the village temples and the slogans posted inside them still seem to get refreshed from time to time.

There are many villages that have been abandoned for ecological or economic reasons. Turning them into distinctive homestay destinations may be one possible path to reviving county-level rural communities. Like Dawan Village, they may have died once, only to be reborn.

The only real sticking point is the price. I casually checked room rates for one day in June: Xipo, Feiniaoji, Nanan, and Dalerzhiye were already sold out. The only property with availability was Xuli, where the room rate was 5600 yuan.

That same day, a flight from Hong Kong to Casablanca, Morocco cost 3043 yuan.

Small-Town Life MY VILLAGE

If you’re short on cash like I am, stay in town instead. Zhongwei is technically a prefecture-level city, so calling it a town may be a little disrespectful, but it really does feel like a lively small town. A few years ago, when I worked in consulting and investing in the consumer sector, there was a trendy phrase: “small-town youth.” In Zhongwei, you can experience that small-town-youth life for yourself.

In many places where the urban layout hasn’t changed much, the drum tower is the center. Find the drum tower, and you can roughly get your bearings without getting lost.

Not far from the drum tower is Red Sun Square. The name tells you there’s a statue of Chairman Mao here. This chairman, at least, was not hailing a cab.

Under the statue were two lottery stalls, where two young people were furiously scratching tickets. By the time we finished walking around and came back, there were somehow six people. It was midnight.

A little farther on is a busy pedestrian street, probably Zhongwei’s only real nightlife destination, though I still don’t know why the density of entertainment clubs is so high.

Besides local restaurants, some chain brands have already made their way into Zhongwei. Tan Yaxue was still doing brisk business late at night, and Mixue Bingcheng seems to be everywhere.

Around midnight, we watched a fight break out between friends on a bridge. Drinking causes trouble.

The next day was Sunday, market day, so whole families came out to stroll around and enjoy the bustle.

Discounted yogurt and twisted fried dough had lines that were no shorter than at Five Guys.

An elderly man getting sleepy at noon. Fruit really was quite cheap, so we bought several large boxes of mulberries, something I normally wouldn’t splurge on.

The city’s only real attraction is the Gao Temple Bao’an Temple, a fairly large complex of historic buildings.

The city’s cultural life also seems to revolve around Bao’an Temple. After exiting the Gao Temple hell exhibit, you step right out to a go-kart track at the entrance—a sea of joy.

Next to the track was another battleground, where older people were locked in combat. I watched for a long time and still couldn’t figure out what game they were playing.

Those less interested in that kind of thing simply sang duets instead, and they still drew quite a crowd.

There was also a little amusement area for fishing tiny fish and shooting toy guns; it seemed like every child in the city had come. In that moment, in this small city of Zhongwei, I suddenly felt the cozy joy of a family outing with kids in tow.

The only headache now is the 3 points deducted for a traffic violation—I still have no idea how to deal with it.

Would you make a trip to Zhongwei for the desert, the pear blossoms, the hotels, or the small-town life?

About the Author

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