Silk Road Journey: 9 Days on the Hexi Corridor, Lanzhou to Dunhuang

Meet in Lanzhou, the corridor's southern gate, a city squeezed between loess cliffs and the Yellow River. Ease in with a walk on the Zhongshan iron bridge — a 1907 German-built span — and the riverside park where locals drink three-gun tea from lidded bowls.

Dinner is the point of Lanzhou: beef noodles, the city's own dish, pulled to order in a dozen thicknesses. A good bowl is judged as 'one clear, two white, three red, four green' — clear broth, white radish, red chilli, green coriander. Your guide will have opinions.

Ride the high-speed rail west across the loess plateau into the corridor proper. By afternoon you are in Zhangye, a Han dynasty garrison town whose name means 'extend the arm' — the outstretched arm of the empire.

The Dafo temple holds the great reclining Buddha, 34.5 metres of clay and paint on a timber frame, cast in 1098 under the Western Xia. The pavilion murals behind the altar include a rare set of Journey to the West scenes centuries older than the novel.

Out at dawn to the Zhangye danxia — the banded sandstone hills that made this area famous, their reds and golds sharpest in the first two hours of light. We go to the quieter northern platform circuit rather than the main deck.

The afternoon is flexible: the Pingshanhu grand gorge for a walk between million-year-old red beds, or the Mati temple grottoes cut into a cliff beneath snow peaks, where the Puguang temple sits in a horseshoe the local gazetteer says a heavenly horse left behind.

Drive west into the corridor's narrowest neck, where the Qilian and Black mountains close to a few kilometres of flat ground. Jiayuguan's fortress, founded in 1372, is the Ming wall's western terminus — three concentric walls, a drill ground, and the legend of the builder Yi Kaizhi, who calculated the exact number of bricks needed and delivered the project one brick spare.

Climb the overhanging great wall section on the Black mountain slope — a steep restored stairway with the gobi spreading north — and end on the fort's ramparts at last light, when the wall's grey brick goes the colour of the desert.

The drive west crosses the Taolai river and hours of open gobi. Stop at the guayuan honeydew melon stands — the county's namesake — before turning up a poplar-lined valley of the Toushui river.

The Yulin caves are what Mogao was before the crowds: forty-plus caves cut between Tang and Yuan, guarded by willows (yulin means elm forest), visited by appointment and almost alone. Cave 25's Tang dynasty paradise tableaux are among the finest murals in China, and you will have them at a whisper's distance.

A short morning drive brings you to Dunhuang, oasis town at the corridor's mouth, where the Silk Road forked north and south of the Taklamakan.

The Mogao caves need two visits and you get both. Today: the general-access caves with your guide, reading the styles forward in time — the Western Wei's slender bodhisattvas, the Tang's fleshy confidence, the Song's formality — and the Library Cave, room 17, where the Abbot Wang's 1900 discovery of fifty thousand manuscripts rewrote the history of central Asia, and where most of them now sit in London and Paris, a fact your guide will discuss honestly.

A gobi day west of town: the Yumen pass, 'Jade Gate', the Han dynasty customs post for jade entering from Khotan, a raw earthen square fort of two thousand years standing in nothing. Beside it, the Han great wall — reed bundles and gravel, not brick — still trailing its beacon lines toward the horizon.

Return by the Yadan landform park if the light is right, or keep the evening easy in Dunhuang's night market: apricot peel water, grilled lamb, and the town's surprisingly good coffee.

Early to the Mingsha dunes before the heat, when the sand is cool and the light rakes the crests. Climb the ridge for the view over Crescent Lake, the spring that has survived between the dunes for two millennia thanks to an engineering trick the county still maintains.

The afternoon is yours — the Dunhuang museum is excellent and uncrowded — before returning to the dunes at dusk, when the day-trippers have gone and the wind makes the sand sing, as the Sui dynasty chronicles already recorded.

Transfer to Dunhuang airport for onward flights — to Urumqi and the oases of Xinjiang, if the road is calling further, or back east with a thousand kilometres of corridor behind you.