Western China Tours

Wester China, with its peculiar glamor and profound historic content, has many things that will be explored. It’s an important passageway leading to the outside world. It’s a tourist attraction of countless scenic spot, some of which have been listed by UNESCO as world natural and cultural heritage sites. Western China can be divided into two parts, northwest and southwest.

Northwest China covers Shaanxi, Gansu and Henan provinces and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The ancient capital city of Xi'an, the centre of this region, has seen one of the most rapid developments of tourism among China's cities following the 1974 excavation of the pottery warriors and horses at the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin in suburban Xi'an. To the east of Xi'an in Henan Province are two more ancient capital cities, Luoyang and Kaifeng. To its west beyond Lanzhou, capital of Gansu, lies the Gansu Corridor which leads west to Xinjiang. The over 1,000-kilometre-long corridor, originally part of the Silk Road, is flanked on the south by the snow-capped peaks of the Qilian Ranges while on the north by the majestic Longshou, Heli and Mazong mountains. Endless stretches of the Gobi desert dotted by oases also are part of the region.

The green hills and mountains of southwest China offer some of the finest scenery in the People's Republic. The region is relatively under populated and under-industrialized, with only one major population centre the Red Basin of Sichuan. As a frontier area, the southwest has a number of hitherto unassimilated tribal peoples, now called national minorities. Most of them are related ethnically to the Thais, Burmese or Tibetans.

The flora and fauna of southwest China is by far the richest in the country. The giant panda of Sichuan is world famous. It is less well known that many of the garden flowers in the west originated from this area discovered by botanist-explorers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.