Dunhuang, Gansu, China 敦煌

After a month in the highlands and mountains of Greater Tibet, arriving in hot, hot Dunhuang was jarring both visually and physically. The green, rolling hills are replaced by the largely flat and featureless Gobi Desert, dominating my train ride throughout Gansu province 甘肅, and the comfortably cool weather replaced by an oppressive (but thankfully dry) heat reaching over 40°C (104°F) on my arrival. No more Tibetan bilingual signs, although that already stopped in Xining, an ethnically-mixed city. Practically every restaurant is halal 清真, and dopis and hijabs are far more visible than before, even amongst the massive numbers of Han tourists: this is a Hui heartland.

Despite the current demographic, this is a significant site of the Silk Road, an area which saw products hailing from faraway Central Asian lands pass through, holding a reputation as a gateway to Xi’an and the rest of China. Its former grandeur as Shazhou 沙洲, the city of sand (and now a non-descript district of the small city of Dunhuang), may have been lost through time and the central government’s previous attitude of cultural neglect and lack of preservation, but plenty of evidence still exists, primarily as an entry point of Buddhism into China.
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