Yinchuan sits on a plain that should be desert and is not. The Helan range blocks the sand coming off the Alxa to the west, the Yellow River runs along the eastern side, and canals cut from the river since the Han have made this a farming basin in the middle of dry country. Local usage calls it the Jiangnan of the frontier, borrowing the name of the rice-and-water south.
The city was the capital of the Western Xia, a state founded by the Tangut in 1038 that held this corner for nearly two centuries and was destroyed by the Mongols in 1227. The erasure was unusually complete. The Tangut script, an invented writing system of several thousand characters, stopped being read, and scholars had to reconstruct it from scratch beginning in the twentieth century. The tombs west of the city are what is left above ground: earth cores stripped of their brick facing, standing on gravel below the mountains.
The other reason to know Yinchuan is current. It has hosted the China-Arab States Expo since 2013, which is why a city many Western visitors have never heard of is a familiar name in Cairo, Riyadh and Dubai. Ningxia is the Hui autonomous region, the 2020 census put Hui at roughly a third of its population, and the food trade here is built around that. For a Muslim traveller the practical result is a city where halal is the default rather than a request, which is not true of much of China.
