Yinchuan Travel Guide
• Yinchuan Flights
• Yinchuan Maps
• Yinchuan Transport
• Yinchuan Weather
• Things to do in Yinchuan
• Yinchuan Food
• Yinchuan Shopping
• Yinchuan Entertainment
See Also
• Beijing Travel Guide
• Shanghai Travel Guide
• Xian Travel Guide
• Guilin Travel Guide

 

Shapotou

View 2 photos, or upload your photo.

The city of Shapotou is located on the southeastern rim of the Tengger Desert, where the latter borders up to the Yellow River, in Zhongwei County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (aka Ningxia). The city of Shapotou also lies about 150 kilometers south of Ningxia's capital city, Yinchuan. It is a fiercely beautiful area, known for its many shifting sand dunes; if it had not been checked, the Tengger Desert might well have engulfed the entire area, obliterating the Baotou-Lanzhou Railroad. Thanks to the efforts of the government, however, the spread of the desert has halted. In fact, the government, via a number of ingenious, cutting-edge measures, is slowly beginning to regain territory previously lost to the Tengger Desert.

The Tengger Desert is famous for a quality that has been known to desert-farers since time immemorial: the "siren song" of the sand dunes. The noise produced by shifting sand dunes can vary from a deep boom to a high-pitched "tweet", it can roll like thunder (in his travel journals, Marco Polo likened it to the pounding of war drums) or it can produce a single, short-lived clap. Whatever the noise, it can be an eerie, unsettling experience, making the desert seem like a haunted expanse from which there is no escape.

The natives of the Tengger Desert have a name for the "siren song" of the sand dunes: "Shaop Mingzhong". Shaop Mingzhong is described as a reverberating noise that is sometimes like the tolling of a bell and sometimes like a vigorous roll of drums, namely, very large, very resonant drums. A French physicist, Stephane Douady, has set up laboratory experiments with loose sand poured through, among other materials, a plexiglass cylinder, the sound then amplified, which replicates the "siren song" of the sand dunes. According to Douady, the range of sounds produced varies with the materials used to provide the base friction, but it also despends on temperature, the velocity of the sliding sand, etc. It is the first scientific attempt to determine the conditions which produce the eerie – and sometimes maddening – sounds of shifting sand dunes.

As to efforts to reverse the desertification of the area, the Chinese government has established the Shapotou Desert Experimental Research Station on the banks of the Yellow River, where the Yellow River meets the Tengger Desert. Using techniques developed at the research station, the planting of relevant types of plants and the use of so-called mocrobial mats (a microbial mat is a multi-layered sheet of micro-organisms, mainly bacteria and Archaea, or single-celled microorganisms) has resulted in the reclamation of large areas previously lost to the Tengger Desert. Areas stabilized in the late 1950s now maintain certain fruit crops, including grapes.

No one wishes to see the desert disappear, however, even if it were possible to see it off; part of the beauty and charm of Shapotou stems from the views of the nearby Tengger Desert and Yellow River. A camel safari across the  Tengger Desert's seemingly endless sand dunes has become a tourism fixture at Shapotou, as has a drift-boat ride down the Yellow River in a locally-fashioned raft of sheepskin. And lastly, a visit to the Tengger Desert's sand dune landscape would be unthinkable without the chance to experience Shaop Mingzhong.

 

Location:

Ticket Price:

Opening Time:

How to get there:

From Yinchuan, you can catch a train to Zhongwei, then take a special tour bus on to Shapotou from the main bus station. Special tour buses run every half hour, and take about an hour from Zhongwei to Shapotou. Alternatively, you can take a taxi to Shapotou from Yinchuan. the fare for the tour bus is 3 yuan each way, while the fare for a taxi is 20 yuan each way.

Tips:

1) Minimum recommended time to allot to a visit to Shapotou: 1 day.

2) It is definitely worth the investment to take a camel safari in the nearby Tengger Desert. It will take two days, but will be two of the most unforgettable days of your life.

3) It takes about 6 hours by camel to reach the Tonghu Grasslands encampment from Shapotou. The fee for renting a camel is 250 yuan, round trip of course, and an additional 50 yuan per day to hire a guide (recommended). You can also get out to the desert by bus (a highway crosses part of it) for the modest fee of 5 yuan. There you can rent sleeping space in a yurt or in a tent, which will set you back 20 yuan per night.