Ulanqab is in Inner Mongolia, in North China.
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Inner Mongolia · City Guide
Ulanqab, Volcanoes Two Hours from Beijing.
Overview
Why Go
More than thirty cinder cones stand across the plateau at Ulanhada, several with their craters intact and small cones inside them. They are the closest volcanic field to Beijing and a high-speed train gets visitors much of the way.
Huitengxile is high meadow at around 2,000 metres, grazed, flowering through the short summer, and covered in wind turbines. The combination is unusual enough that it is what people photograph.
Siziwang Banner was the main landing zone for Chinese crewed spacecraft from 2003 until 2021, when the primary site moved to the Gobi at Dongfeng. The grassland here is where the capsules used to come back.
The cold, dry, sandy plateau suits potatoes better than grain, and Ulanqab supplies seed potatoes across the country. Restaurants here will serve visitors a whole table of them and mean it seriously.
Daihai has fallen from over 200 square kilometres to under 50 as irrigation and a drying climate took the inflow. Water is now being channelled back into it. The old shoreline is visible well out from the present one.
See
A field of cinder cones on open plateau, with numbers three, five and six the well-preserved. Access is now managed and driving on the cones is restricted after years of damage. Half a day.
High grazing meadow with a ravine cut through it, flowering from late June, and a wind farm across the whole plateau. Cool even in August. A day, and there are camps to stay in.
A shallow lake in a basin at Liangcheng with hot springs on one shore and a wide band of dry ground between the old and current waterlines. Quiet, and the shrinkage is the thing to look at. Two hours.
A Ming and Qing town on the caravan road that ran from Zhangjiakou to Urga, with a mosque, temples and old shopfronts along one long street. Listed as a historic town and barely visited. Two hours.
Open grassland in Siziwang Banner with a visitor camp and, out on the plain, the zone Shenzhou capsules landed in until 2021. There is little to see at the site itself; the grassland is the reason to go.
Steep ridges in Xinghe County covered in pine planted from the 1950s onward on ground that was bare. One of the larger planted forests in the region. Cool in summer. A full day.
On the Map
Approximate locations of the attractions above, across Ulanqab.
Eat
Shredded and fried with vinegar, mashed with fermented cabbage, cut into chunks and stewed with mutton, or baked in the ash. Order the set and visitors get six or seven different treatments of the same vegetable.
Whole chicken brined, cooked and smoked over sugar and sawdust until the skin goes deep brown. It made its name as food sold to train passengers at Zhuozishan and is still sold that way.
Naked oat flour scalded with boiling water, rolled by hand into tubes or shells and steamed, then dipped in mutton or pickled broth. It is the plateau's own grain and it fills visitors for a whole day.
Pressed curd, dried cheese and rolled milk skin, made to keep without cold storage. Chahar households make a drier, harder style than the eastern banners. Eaten with salted milk tea rather than alone.
Do
Use the marked paths: the cones are loose scoria and years of vehicles and boots cut scars that do not heal. From the rim visitors can see the next cones lined up across the plain.
The meadow is walkable in any direction and the turbine noise carries oddly across open grass. Late June to early August is when the flowers are actually out; outside that it is plain pasture.
One street carries the whole town, with the mosque at one end and temple remains at the other. It takes forty minutes and visitors will probably have it to themselves.
Ask for the potato set rather than individual dishes. Doing it once makes the point that this is a staple crop region, not a side vegetable, and it costs very little.
When
The sole reliable window: meadow flowering, grass green, days warm and nights cold. Beijing weekend traffic fills the volcano field.
Clear, gold and quiet, with the ideal light on the cones and the crowds gone. Nights drop below freezing on the plateau.
Brown, very windy and cold, with camps closing. The old towns and the smoked chicken still work.
Long cold to minus thirty, dust in spring, and grass that does not come back until late May. Not the season for anything outdoors here.
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Ulanqab is in Inner Mongolia, in North China.
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