3 Days in Dunhuang

The visit starts here, not at the caves. The cave area has no ticket office and no visitor parking, so you check in at this center, 9 km from town, and a shuttle takes you on. Its ticket windows run 9:15-15:00 from April to November (9:10 from December), entry is by real name (ticket, passport and person must match), and the Academy wants you here 30 minutes before your slot.

The normal ticket includes a digital film first, a primer rather than a replacement for the caves. Suitcases, big bags, pets and drones can't go to the cave area, and the center stores luggage for free. City bus 12 and taxis both come here.

By the story, a monk named Yuezun saw a thousand Buddhas in golden light on this cliff in 366 and began digging. That is a legend, but the digging was real and lasted until the Yuan dynasty. In June 1900 a Daoist caretaker, Wang Yuanlu, found a walled-up cave, the Library Cave (Cave 17), full of manuscripts sealed in the eleventh century. No one knows why: one theory says monks hid them before an invasion, another that it was a store for worn-out texts. In 1907 and 1908 Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot got great numbers of them in exchange for donations to Wang's repairs, and they now sit in London, Paris, Beijing and Berlin. The Diamond Sutra of 868, the earliest dated printed book, is among them. Rescue or loss is still argued.

The practical part matters more. From April to November the site opens 8:00-18:00 and the normal visit is the film plus eight caves with a guide, on an assigned route. From December to March it opens 9:00-17:00 and you see ten. Normal tickets are capped at 6,000 a day, and in busy weeks the Academy can switch to an emergency mode of 4 caves and no film, with a 12,000 limit. Fourteen special caves open separately, in limited numbers, after your tour. Photography is banned in every cave. It is a small slice of about 500 caves, and still one of the best half days in China.

Back in town, eat a bowl of huangmian, yellow noodles, with donkey meat. The noodles are thin and golden under a sauce of mushroom, tofu and meat, and the donkey is sold alongside. Locals count it among the town's eight oddities.

Any noodle shop on Yangguan Middle Road will do. Order the noodles with a side plate of meat, and ask the price before you sit down.

A small nine-level adobe stupa about 12 meters high, on the edge of town. The story says it commemorates the white horse of the translator Kumarajiva, which died here around 384 after carrying scriptures from Kucha. The horse is a legend, and the pagoda was repaired in the 1840s and again in 1992. Locals say the wind bells are the horse neighing.

A quiet half hour after the caves, and the easiest stop to skip if you're tired.

A 5-meter statue of a figure playing a pipa (a pear-shaped lute) behind the back, copied from a mural in Cave 112 at Mogao. It is the symbol of Dunhuang and the town's photo stop. Take your picture at dusk, then walk the few minutes to the market.

A built market of Tang-style streets in 10 themed zones, with more than 100 craft stalls and a food hall, Dunhuang Foods, at 447 Yangguan Middle Road. It is made for visitors, and it is also where the local dishes sit side by side: donkey noodles, jiangshui noodles, cold niangpi, lamb skewers and chops, roasted fish.

Eat first, then stroll the craft streets. It runs from the afternoon to late at night.

Mogao's little sister, 35 km southwest of town on the north bank of the Dang River. About 40 caves are left, 22 of them painted, with 34 colored statues and 800 square meters of murals from the sixth century to the early Ming. Floods and collapse took the rest. The Dunhuang Academy runs it too.

It costs a fraction of Mogao, and bags and cameras go in a free store at the ticket office. Take a taxi or a western-route shuttle, and don't expect Mogao's quality. Go for the cliff above the river and a sense of how many such places there were.

For lunch, a bowl of jiangshui mian, handmade noodles in a soured vegetable water. The liquid is made by fermenting greens in a jar for about three days, then poured over the noodles with oil, scallion and coriander. It is sour and clean, and a classic for hot days across Shaanxi and Gansu.

Pair it with niangpi, cold chewy sheets in a chili sauce. Noodle shops around Yangguan Middle Road serve both.

A crescent-shaped spring in a hollow among the dunes, 6 km south of town, and one of Dunhuang's eight classic scenes since the Han. In 1960 it averaged 4-5 meters deep. Over four decades it fell to about one meter as groundwater was pumped, and since 2006 the authorities have been refilling it, slowly.

It is small. You come for blue water against sand and a walk around it before the climb.

Mingsha Shan means singing sand mountain. When the wind blows, the sand gives off a low drumming sound, and Sima Qian wrote that it was like music on a fine day. The dunes belong to the Kumtag Desert, and the climb to the ridge is steep, with sand filling your shoes. From the top you look down at the lake.

Sandboarding, camel rides, ATVs and paragliding are all on offer. Go in late afternoon in summer, cover your head, and wear shoes you can empty.

Camel rides run in a line across the dunes, usually under an hour. It is touristy, and still a quiet way to cross the sand. Book the hour before sunset.

Sunset comes around 18:30 in early November and after 21:00 in June, and it gets cold fast after dark. Walk to a ridge, sit, and watch the shadows climb the dunes. Start down before the light goes, because the way out in the dark is slow.

Dinner is grilled lamb, the standard of the northwest: skewers seasoned with cumin and chili, and chops off the same grill. Order ten or so skewers each, with flatbread and a green vegetable, and wash it down with a beer or apricot tea.

Hecang, also called Dafangpan City, is the second fortress of the Yumen Pass site, about 12 km from the pass. It dates from the Western Han and was a military depot with three storehouses for the garrison's grain and supplies. It stands a few meters above a seasonal wetland, with ventilation holes in the walls to fight damp.

Keep off the walls and give it half an hour. It is the best place to understand how a garrison on the edge of the Gobi was fed.

The Jade Gate. Emperor Wudi built it soon after 121 BC at the end of the wall that ran west from Jiuquan, and it was named for the jade caravans from Khotan. Soldiers sent news by signal fire and farmed in peacetime. Tang poets made it the edge of the known world: Wang Zhihuan wrote that the spring wind never crosses it. Trade later shifted north and the pass was abandoned.

What survives is a square earthen fort in a gravel plain by the Shule River. It is not grand, and the draw is the emptiness. In 1907 Stein found bamboo slips naming the place Yumenguan. It joined the UNESCO Silk Roads listing in 2014.

West of the pass the Han wall runs on across the gravel in low, broken ridges with beacon towers. This is not the Ming wall of the postcards, and it is over 2,000 years old. The Yumen Pass site counts 18 sections of wall and 20 beacon towers, and more than 2,400 items have been dug up there, among them bamboo slips, silk and weapons.

Maquanwan, west of the pass, is one of the marked ruins. Stop for 20 minutes on the way to Yadan, and expect to be alone.

A national geopark of wind-carved clay ridges, called yardangs, covering about 400 square kilometers of Gobi, 158 km from town. They formed over some 700,000 years, and formations are named for what they resemble: a camel, a sphinx, a stone bird. In Chinese it is also known as the devil's city.

A park shuttle stops at four viewpoints on the north line (1.5-2 hours), and the full loop with the south line takes 3-4 hours, which this day can't fit. Do the north line. It is vast, bare and silent.

Back in town after a long day, finish at the fruit stalls. Dunhuang is known for Li Guang apricots, fresh in summer and dried the rest of the year, and for xiangshui pears, which locals sell dark. Apricot skin tea (xingpishui) is a cold, sweet-sour drink, a milder cousin of sour plum drink.

Buy dried apricots to take home.