Xi'an to Dunhuang along the Silk Road took me thirteen days and twelve nights — but two of those days and nights we spent driving straight through on the expressway, and Dunhuang started with two days of quarantine. The right pace is: two days in Xi'an (one for the Terracotta Army, one for hanfu and the Grand Tang Mall), then west through Lanzhou and Xining, Qinghai Lake, Chaka and Da Qaidam, reaching Dunhuang over four or five easy days. Dunhuang itself deserves three: Mingsha Shan and Crescent Lake, the Mogao Caves plus an evening at Encore Dunhuang, and a full day out to the Yardang and the two frontier passes. Finish by flying out of Dunhuang, or take the train from Yumen. The unhurried version comes in two shapes below, nine days and thirteen.
The three days in Dunhuang were worth the whole trip — Mogao, Mingsha Shan, Yardang: fifteen hundred years of the Silk Road put in front of you. The part not to copy is those two days and nights. The lockdown forced them; however good the scenery was, we never once stopped the car.
Place names are given in English with the Chinese in brackets — tap the bracket to copy it, so you can show it to a driver or paste it into a map.
The basics
- Route
- Out: Xi'an → Baoji → Tianshui → Dingxi → Lanzhou → Xining → Hainan → Ulan → Haixi → Da Qaidam → Dunhuang.
Back: Dunhuang → Yumen → Jiuquan → Zhangye → Wuwei → Lanzhou → Lintao → Longnan → Guangyuan → Mianyang → Chengdu - Days
- 13 days, 12 nights (left Chengdu 29 September 2022, back about 11 October)
- When we drove it
- Late September to early October 2022, around the National Day holiday, during the pandemic
- Best season
- June, and September–October. Dunhuang's golden window is mid-September to early October (15–25°C, the least wind-blown sand, the best colour). April–June is the next best. If you want the rapeseed around Qinghai Lake as well, that's mid-July to mid-August — but that is the hottest stretch out there
- Best light
- Mingsha Shan in the evening; Mogao by whatever slot you're booked into; the Yardang and the passes in the afternoon
- Pace
- 2022: brutal. Two days and nights without leaving the expressway, and the drive home without sleep. The right pace is slow — see the two itineraries below
- Driving
- Your own car (we drove ours). Public transport is thin for the middle stretch into the Qaidam basin — drive it yourself, or take a chartered car and driver
The route, leg by leg
- Xi'anStart · Day 1 850 km · a full day
- XiningDay 3~2,200 m 150 km · 2 h
- Qinghai LakeDay 4~3,200 m 150 km · 2 h
- ChakaDay 4 330 km · 4 h
- Da QaidamDay 5~3,100 m 450 km · most of a day
- DunhuangFinish · Days 6–9~1,100 m
Approximate driving distance and time from one stop to the next (read top to bottom), not counting time spent at them.
This is the seventh route in this notebook, and the only one that isn't in western Sichuan: it starts in Shaanxi, crosses Gansu, and stops at the far western edge of Gansu. The first half is Xi'an and its buried army; the second half is the Silk Road and the caves. The two days and nights in between were forced on us by the pandemic — I've written them as they happened, and I don't suggest you copy them.
I first drove this in late September 2022. The schedule was improvised under pressure, which is why the piece ends with a section I don't usually write: how I'd do it if I went again.
How the thirteen days fit together
| Day | Date | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| Prologue | 29–30 Sep | Chengdu to Xi'an, two days. Not the subject of this piece — the Silk Road starts in Xi'an |
| D1 | 30 Sep | Arrive Xi'an; the Terracotta Army that same afternoon |
| D2 | 1 Oct | Hanfu photographs, then the Grand Tang Mall after dark |
| D3 | 2 Oct | West, bound for Qinghai Lake as planned |
| D4 | 3 Oct | Still on the expressway — the exits were closed |
| D5 | 4 Oct | Arrive Dunhuang; straight into quarantine |
| D6 | 5 Oct | Second day of quarantine |
| D7 | 6 Oct | Mingsha Shan and Crescent Lake |
| D8 | 7 Oct | The Mogao Caves; Encore Dunhuang in the evening |
| D9 | 8 Oct | Yardang, Yumen Pass and Yang Pass — out and back in a day |
| D10 | 9 Oct | The drive home begins |
| D11 | 10 Oct | Still driving home, two days and nights |
| D12 | 11 Oct | Back in Chengdu |
Prologue — Chengdu to Xi'an, two days (29–30 Sep)
We left Chengdu on 29 September and reached Xi'an on the 30th. Those two days aren't the subject here: the Silk Road starts in Xi'an.
D1 — Arriving in Xi'an: the Terracotta Army that afternoon (30 Sep)
We went to the Terracotta Army the same afternoon we arrived. The schedule was tight, but this wasn't the stop to cut — in Xi'an it's the one you can't skip.
Its proper name is the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, out in Lintong, east of the city: the burial pits of the First Emperor's mausoleum, garrisoning the man who unified China in 221 BC. In 1974 a farmer sinking a well turned up a piece of terracotta, and an army that had slept for two thousand years came back into the light; in 1987 it was inscribed with the mausoleum as a World Heritage Site. Three things to look at. Scale: thousands of life-size figures across the pits, infantry, chariots and cavalry, each arm drawn up in formation. The faces: look closely and no two are quite alike — topknots, armour, the set of the hands, all different. Colour: they came out of the ground painted, and the paint flaked away within hours of meeting the air, so the grey you see is not what they were. Photographs can't give you the feeling of standing at the edge of the pit with an army facing you.
D2 — Xi'an again: hanfu and the Grand Tang Mall (1 Oct)
The next day we put on hanfu near the Grand Tang Mall and had a set of photographs taken, then went back to walk the mall after dark. Same place, two completely different faces — daytime in costume among the crowds, night with every light on.
D3–D4 — West, and the two days we couldn't leave the expressway (from 2 Oct)
We set off on the third morning, planning to reach Qinghai Lake.
We never stopped. The pandemic controls closed the exits along the route — barriers down at the toll gates, service areas running on very little — so we just kept driving. The line was: Xi'an → Baoji → Tianshui → Dingxi → Lanzhou → Xining → Hainan → Ulan → Haixi → Da Qaidam, two days and two nights of it, straight into Dunhuang — a city that had no cases at the time.
The route skims the southern shore of Qinghai Lake, in Hainan prefecture — the place we had been aiming for, passed by the side of the road.
That stretch deserves its own paragraph, though. The scenery never stopped changing: forest, then grassland, then gobi, then desert — landform after landform, like a geography textbook on fast-forward. And at night, at that altitude, the whole Milky Way came out. We earned none of it, but it was the one thing the drive gave back.
D5–D6 — Arriving in Dunhuang: quarantine first (4–5 Oct)
We reached Dunhuang on the fifth day and were put in quarantine for two days of observation — in that period nobody got around it. Only after that did the trip actually start.
D7 — First day out: Mingsha Shan and Crescent Lake (6 Oct)
The first stop was Mingsha Shan and Crescent Lake : a crescent of water inside a ring of dunes. Give it the best light of the day — the evening, when the low sun brings out the ridgelines on the sand.
D8 — Second day out: the Mogao Caves, then Encore Dunhuang (7 Oct)
The Mogao Caves are the heaviest thing the Silk Road left at Dunhuang. You go through a handful of caves, and fifteen hundred years of wall painting and sculpture are simply in front of you. They were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1987; the first caves were cut in the Former Qin period and building went on across more than ten dynasties, which makes this one of the largest surviving bodies of Buddhist art anywhere. The detail inside I'll leave out — I went through with a guide, and no list of numbers reads half as well as standing in the cave.
In the evening we saw Encore Dunhuang . It's a large-scale indoor experiential theatre piece, directed by Wang Chaoge and first performed in 2016 for the first Silk Road (Dunhuang) International Cultural Expo. The theatre stands beside the Mogao digital centre: a sunken building in lake-blue, built to look like a drop of water in the desert. What makes it unusual is that the audience walks — you move through the space with the story, entering different "caves" in batches, and fifty years, a hundred, a thousand pass under your feet.
All three of these — Mogao, Mingsha Shan, Encore Dunhuang — I'd call unmissable. Between them you get the history of the whole Silk Road, and the stories of the people who opened it.
D9 — Yardang, Yumen Pass and Yang Pass, out and back in a day (8 Oct)
We drove out to the Yardang and came back the same day, passing the Yang Pass and the Yumen Pass on the way.
Out in the gobi there's a great field of wind-carved clay ridges that people here call the "Demon City" — the wind is strong, the shapes are strange, and once you're driving among them both the car and the people look very small.
Do foreigners need a special permit for the Yardang?
We were checked hard, and the officers on duty were armed. I worked out afterwards why — keep going deeper past the Yardang and you're heading towards Lop Nur, and that country is a military area, which is why the checks along this line have never been relaxed. It isn't aimed at tourists; it's a standing check, and worth taking in your stride.
Dunhuang, the Yardang, Yumen Pass and Yang Pass all sit inside ordinary tourist areas, and need no frontier permit; foreign visitors buy tickets on their passport like anyone else. Gansu's border-control zone only runs towards the Mazongshan port in Subei. But the checks here are strict — keep your passport on you, and re-confirm the current rules before you travel.
D10–D12 — The drive home, without stopping (from 9 Oct)
Back along the expressway: Dunhuang → Yumen → Jiuquan → Zhangye → Wuwei → Lanzhou → Lintao → Longnan → Guangyuan → Mianyang → Chengdu, two days and two nights.
The pandemic made the whole return a rush — we drove it more or less without sleeping. This line deserves better than that, and I don't recommend the pace. What I do recommend is below.
If I went again, this is how I'd arrange it
The short answer: give this line nine to thirteen days, depending on whether you want to arrive or to travel. Both versions start in Xi'an, finish in Dunhuang or Yumen, and never double back — fly out of Dunhuang, or take the train from Yumen, and you don't have to drive the car home.
Option A — long hauls, concentrated (9 days, 8 nights)
Two long days, everything else slow.
| Day | Route | Distance (approximate) | What you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| D1 | Xi'an | — | Terracotta Army — a whole day, unhurried |
| D2 | Xi'an | — | Hanfu + the Grand Tang Mall (costume by day, lights at night) |
| D3 | Xi'an → Xining 🚗 | about 850 km · a full day of expressway | A driving day. Guanzhong plain, loess plateau, Lanzhou — the landscape changes all the way; stop in Lanzhou for a bowl of beef noodles and carry on |
| D4 | Xining → Qinghai Lake → Chaka | about 300 km · half a day | Qinghai Lake (Erlangjian or Heimahe, lake and grassland), then Chaka Salt Lake , the "mirror of the sky" |
| D5 | Chaka → Da Qaidam | about 330 km · half a day | Grassland gives way to gobi; Da Qaidam's Emerald Lake |
| D6 | Da Qaidam → Dunhuang 🚗 | about 450 km · most of a day | Over the Dangjin Pass into Gansu; a long day. Dunhuang by afternoon, Mingsha Shan at dusk |
| D7 | Dunhuang | — | Mogao Caves, then Encore Dunhuang in the evening |
| D8 | Dunhuang | — | Yardang + Yumen Pass + Yang Pass — a full day out and back |
| D9 | Finish | — | Fly out of Dunhuang, or take the train from Yumen |
Option B — a little driving every day (13 days, 12 nights)
Three to five hours a day, something to see every day, and the worthwhile stops along the road added in.
| Day | Route | Distance (approximate) | What you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| D1 | Xi'an | — | Terracotta Army |
| D2 | Xi'an | — | Hanfu + the Grand Tang Mall |
| D3 | Xi'an → Tianshui | about 320 km · 4 h | Added stop: the Maijishan Grottoes — the overture to the Silk Road caves, answering the Mogao Caves at the other end |
| D4 | Tianshui → Lanzhou | about 330 km · 4 h | A stretch of the Yellow River in Lanzhou, and a bowl of beef noodles to finish |
| D5 | Lanzhou → Xining | about 220 km · 2.5 h | The altitude steps up to around 2,200 m — take it easy; wander Xining town |
| D6 | Xining → Qinghai Lake | about 150 km · 2 h | Qinghai Lake, round the shore (Erlangjian or Heimahe); stay out for a Heimahe sunrise |
| D7 | Qinghai Lake → Chaka | about 150 km · 2 h | Chaka Salt Lake, the "mirror of the sky" |
| D8 | Chaka → Da Qaidam | about 330 km · 4 h | Added stop: the Emerald Lake at Da Qaidam |
| D9 | Da Qaidam → Dunhuang | about 450 km · 5.5 h | Over the Dangjin Pass; into Dunhuang by afternoon |
| D10 | Dunhuang | — | Mingsha Shan and Crescent Lake (take the late light) |
| D11 | Dunhuang | — | Mogao Caves, then Encore Dunhuang in the evening |
| D12 | Dunhuang | — | Yardang + Yumen Pass + Yang Pass — out and back in a day |
| D13 | Finish | — | Fly out of Dunhuang / train from Yumen |
The distances and driving times in these tables are approximate road figures, and don't include time spent at the stops.
Which one
- A week and a bit of leave → Option A. Compress the two long legs (Xi'an–Xining, Da Qaidam–Dunhuang) into single days and give everything left to Qinghai Lake and Dunhuang.
- Two weeks → Option B. Three to five hours of driving a day, one thing to see a day, and you pick up Maijishan, Lanzhou, Qinghai Lake and Da Qaidam on the way.
The difference from 2022 comes down to one sentence: spread out what was crushed into two days and two nights, and treat the passing through as arriving.
The two things people get wrong
Both of these caught me
Thinking this line can be taken slowly on the way. It can't — not that way. Six of those thirteen days were forced on us by lockdowns and quarantine: two days and nights on the expressway, two days of quarantine in Dunhuang, two more days and nights driving home. The actual travelling was two days in Xi'an and three in Dunhuang.
Thinking the Yardang needs a permit. It doesn't. Dunhuang, the Yardang, Yumen Pass and Yang Pass are all inside ordinary tourist areas. But the checks along that road are real — keep your passport on you, not in the boot.
When to shoot
- Evening — Mingsha Shan and Crescent Lake. This is the one stop on the route worth building the day around: the sand's ridgelines only come out in low light.
- Morning to noon — Mogao, by whatever slot you're booked into; on the long gobi roads these are driving hours.
- Afternoon — Yardang, Yumen Pass, Yang Pass: in the afternoon the shadows make the clay ridges read.
- After dark — look up on the plateau. On the two nights we drove through, the Milky Way ran the whole way over.
Want the Hexi Corridor as well?
If you have days to spare and don't mind ending in Lanzhou instead of Dunhuang, skip the backtrack: leave Dunhuang eastward along the Hexi Corridor — Guazhou, Jiayuguan, the Danxia landforms at Zhangye — and finish in Lanzhou. This corridor was the main artery of the Silk Road, and the place-names along it are still the old ones. If you'd rather keep Dunhuang as the ending, add (the Yulin Caves, east of Dunhuang) as a side stop: the caves are cut into the cliffs of the Yulin River valley, an easy add-on.
If you're coming to shoot
- Wide for the gobi, long for the Yardang. The layers in that field of ridges only come out if you pick them off with a long lens.
- Wait for low light at Mingsha Shan. At noon the sand goes flat white.
- Inside the caves, follow whatever you're told on the day — whether you can photograph and how. This one isn't negotiable.
- The same line as everywhere else on this site: what I offer is knowing where to stand and how to get the shot — not shooting it for you.
Questions people ask before they go
Isn't thirteen days too long?
Why finish at Dunhuang, or Yumen?
Can foreigners do it?
What do I need to book?
Can I do this without a car?
Will I get altitude sickness?
Honest notes
This is a real trip, driven in 2022 while the pandemic controls were on — the closed exits, the quarantine, the nights on the expressway were all part of it. I've written it down as it happened, without comment.
Every road in this piece is one I've driven myself. Conditions change: a site changes its hours, a road is under repair, somewhere stops letting people in. If you get there and something is different, tell me and I'll correct the page.
There are no ticket prices and no opening hours on this page — they move, and I'm not going to hand you a number you shouldn't trust.
The two itineraries at the end are mine: the nine-day one compresses the two long legs into single days, the thirteen-day one drives three to five hours a day and sees something every day. The stops I've added are the ones that fall on the road and can be checked.
There's only one photograph, and it's enough: our two Shiba Inus at their desert dinner in Dunhuang — lamps lit, table laid, and two dogs sitting up straighter than anyone.
If you're working out how this route fits your dates, and what the light is doing in the month you're thinking about, that's worth asking before you commit — write to me.