Zhongwei is where the Tengger desert runs into the Yellow River, and the interesting part is what people did about it. When the Baotou to Lanzhou railway was pushed through here in the 1950s, the sand buried the track faster than crews could clear it. The fix, worked out at a research station on the dunes, was to press wheat straw into the sand in one-metre squares so the surface could not move, then let hardy plants take hold inside the grid. The railway opened in 1958 and it is still open. The method has been exported and studied since, which makes this a particularly legible place in China to look at desertification control rather than read about it.
The tourism that grew on top of that is a different register: sand sledding, zip lines across the river, camel strings, and a chairlift. It is busy and it is commercial, and it sits directly on top of one of the more serious pieces of applied science in the country. Both things are true at once and the site does not really reconcile them.
In town, Gaomiao is worth the half hour. It is a single stacked complex holding Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian halls together, built up over centuries and rebuilt after a fire in the 1940s. Arrangements like this existed all over China and very few survive; seeing one intact explains more about how religion was actually practised than a row of separate temples ever does. Zhongwei has also become a data-centre hub, because the air is dry and cold and the power is cheap. A desert town chosen for its climate by an industry that did not exist when the straw grids went down is a reasonable summary of the place.
