Baotou

Nobody goes to Baotou for Baotou. That is the received wisdom, and it is mostly correct. Inner Mongolia’s largest city made itself on iron ore and coal, and the industrial districts that run along the Yellow River show exactly what decades of heavy manufacturing look like: foundries and cooling towers and loading facilities and the particular kind of city planning that happens when the primary priority is logistics. I stayed two nights and spent the first afternoon walking the Donghe district, the older part of the city, trying to find its character. I found it eventually, in a street market near the old Muslim quarter where Hui vendors were selling roasted seeds from conical metal drums and the lamb skewers were spiced in a way that suggested Xinjiang influence somewhere back in the supply chain.

The city rewards a different approach, which is to use it as a base and push out from it. The Kubuqi Desert is ninety minutes south. The grassland is north. And forty kilometers west — an easy morning drive through scrubland and small farming villages — is Meidai Zhao, a monastery that would be famous anywhere in the world except that it sits in the wrong place for the kind of attention it deserves.

Meidai Zhao was built in the sixteenth century under the patronage of Altan Khan, the Tumed Mongolian ruler who invited the third Dalai Lama to Mongolia and established the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism as the dominant religious tradition across the Mongolian plateau. The monastery complex reflects this origin with unusual architectural complexity — it is part Mongolian, part Han Chinese, part Tibetan, the three traditions layered onto each other across four centuries in a way that should look confused but instead looks like a negotiation that came out well. The main hall has Han-style upturned eaves sitting on Mongolian-style stone foundations with Tibetan-style wheel motifs in the roof tiles, and the whole thing is backed against a hill that turns ochre and rust in the afternoon sun in a way that seems designed.

I arrived on a weekday morning and there were perhaps eight visitors, four of whom appeared to be local. The monks going about the compound moved with the practiced efficiency of people who have somewhere specific to be. There was incense burning in the main courtyard and the smell of it mixed with the smell of the dry hillside in a way that produced something more complex than either. I sat in the courtyard for an hour while a monk in the hall above played a drum at intervals I could not predict, and felt the specific pleasure of being somewhere extraordinary that does not know it is extraordinary.

The second unmissable thing near Baotou is the Wudangzhao monastery, forty-five kilometers northeast, which is older and more visited than Meidai Zhao and sits in a valley with a more dramatic topographic situation, the temple complex stepping up a narrow canyon in red rock, the upper temples visible from the valley floor as small red and gold shapes in the cliff face. It is more self-conscious about being impressive than Meidai Zhao and more photogenic for it.

Back in the city, the Donghe night market is where Baotou shows its best face: lamb chops on charcoal grills, large flatbreads baked in clay ovens and brought to the table still hot, milk tea in ceramic bowls, and the sound of a city that works hard and eats accordingly. I ate more lamb in Baotou in two days than I normally eat in a month and felt entirely good about it.

When to go: April through October works well — Baotou is a transit and base city that functions year-round, and the monasteries are accessible in all but the heaviest snowfall. August sees peak tourism in the region but Meidai Zhao remains relatively uncrowded even then. September and October are ideal, with the hills around both monasteries going golden and the air dry and cool.