Dunhuang sits in the wild, wild west of China: a good 2,000 kilometres west of Beijing, in the far west of Gansu Province, right on the Silk Road that caravans took from China to the Middle East for the better part of two thousand years. The town is an oasis — a thin green strip of poplar and farmland squeezed between the gravel desert of the Gobi to the north and the dunes of the Kumtag to the south — and the contrast is its defining feature. You can stand at the edge of town and watch the irrigated fields end abruptly in a wall of yellow sand.
The reason to come is the Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes, twenty-five kilometres southeast of town. Carved into a sandstone cliff between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, the 492 surviving caves contain the finest collection of Buddhist mural painting and sculpture anywhere in the world — kilometres of frescoes, thousands of painted statues, and a sealed library cave whose contents reshaped the history of East Asia when it was opened in 1900. Even a half-day visit is one of the great experiences a traveller in China can have.
The town itself is small, friendly, and increasingly geared to tourism. Reservation Square in the centre, with its statue of a Tang-dynasty pipa player, is the focal point; the main night market spreads out east of it, full of grilled lamb skewers, Hui Muslim noodle stalls, and shops selling jade and dried apricots from the Hexi Corridor. A short bus ride or camel ride south of town brings you to the Singing Sand Dunes and Crescent Lake, a perfect crescent-shaped pond that has somehow survived in a hollow between the dunes for two thousand years.
For the truly committed there is more: the ruined Han-dynasty Yumen Pass and Yangguan Pass, the wind-carved rock formations of Yardang National Geopark, and stretches of rammed-earth Great Wall older than anything you will see at Badaling. None of these rival the caves for beauty, but the desert drive out to them — past dust devils and the occasional camel train — is half the point. Dunhuang is best visited in late spring or early autumn; high summer is fiercely hot and crowded, and winters can drop below minus twenty.