Ejin Banner

There is a specific quality to light that filters through Euphrates poplar leaves in October, and I know this now with the precision of someone who has stood inside it. The leaves are oval and thin, and when they turn they go the color of old gold, not the orange-red of maple but a pure bright gold that has almost no brown in it, and the trees grow so close together along the river banks that walking among them feels like walking through a kind of attenuated light source, the sun coming from everywhere at once, diffused and multiplied, the shadows of ten thousand leaf-edges moving on the sand between the roots. I stayed for three days in Ejin Banner and walked into the forest every morning before breakfast and stood there until I could identify what I was experiencing, which took until the third morning. What I was experiencing was joy, the uncomplicated kind that arrives unexpectedly and leaves before you’ve thought about it enough.

Ejin Banner sits in the Alxa League, three hundred kilometers north of Jiuquan in Gansu, accessible by a high-speed train that delivers you to a small station in the desert from which the rest requires negotiation. The town of Dalain Hob is the base — small, functional, oriented around the autumn tourism season with a slightly stunned air in the off-months, like a town that knows it has one thing to offer and makes a reasonable living from it. The thing it has to offer is the Ejina Poplar Forest, a strip of ancient poplars that lines both banks of the Ruoshui River for 260 kilometers, described in tourist literature as one of the three great poplar forests in the world and described by the people who have actually been there as something significantly harder to reduce to a sentence.

The Ruoshui River ends here — technically it terminates in the Juyan Lakes, which have contracted dramatically from what they were in the Han Dynasty but still hold enough water in wet years to reflect the poplars in a way that doubles the gold and makes even moderately composed photographs look improbable. The reed beds around the lakes hold birds I couldn’t name, and in the morning there were bar-headed geese in formations overhead, the sound of them arriving before they became visible, that two-note call that carries extraordinary distances in thin desert air.

What I had not expected was the historical weight of the place. The Han Dynasty watchtowers stand along the desert edge beyond the poplars, their rammed-earth shapes eroded but standing, part of the ancient Silk Road defensive network that marked the edge of the settled world. One afternoon I walked out to the nearest tower, a thirty-minute walk through scrub beyond the treeline, and stood at its base in the wind and tried to hold the scale of it: this post had been manned two thousand years ago by soldiers writing letters home about the cold and the homesickness, and those letters have been found in the desert sands nearby, preserved by the same aridity that is now slowly eating what remains of the tower.

The poplar forest peaks in the first two weeks of October and the window is narrow — a week on either side of peak can be the difference between full gold and the first brown, between the light being in the leaves and the leaves being on the ground. I timed it approximately right on my visit and consider it one of the better accidental decisions of my traveling life.

When to go: The first two weeks of October for the autumn color — local wisdom puts peak yellow around October 5-15 depending on the year, and it is worth checking recent reports before committing to the journey. The drive from Dunhuang in Gansu is spectacular and adds cultural context. The rest of the year is desert summer and winter with limited forest interest, though the historical sites are accessible year-round and the spring desert flowers in April are their own quiet reward.