Yanchi

Yanchi is a county of about 159,000 people in easternmost Ningxia, wedged into the corner where the region meets Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and Gansu, and its name - literally 'salt pond' - recalls the more than twenty salt lakes that made it a strategic salt-producing district for centuries. Today its identity is built on the Tan sheep: something close to seventy percent of the population depends directly or indirectly on the herd, and Yanchi Tan lamb is prized nationwide, having been served at state banquets including the G20 summit, alongside a smaller trade in buckwheat, daylily buds and liquorice root. The county has no university, and students travel to Yinchuan or Xi'an for higher education, but Yanchi's cultural pull is unusually strong for its size: the Ming dynasty Changcheng Pass, first built in 1531 and reconstructed in 2016, is the only pass along the whole Great Wall actually named 'Great Wall', and it anchors the Yanzhou Ancient City tourism area together with the Ningxia Great Wall Museum. Yanchi is also revolutionary ground - the Red Army liberated it on 21 June 1936, creating Ningxia's first county-level red government - and its Martyrs Memorial Park is listed among China's hundred classic red-tourism sites, while the Haba Lake National Nature Reserve to the north shows how desert steppe has been coaxed back into wetland and grassland.