Ordos

There are two Ordos, and you need to visit both to understand what the place is. Old Dongsheng is a working Chinese city on the plateau, mid-sized, dust-blown, commercially energetic in the way of cities that have found something in the ground worth extracting — in this case, coal, so much coal that for a period in the 2000s this was reportedly one of the wealthiest places per capita in China. Then there is Kangbashi, the new district built fifteen kilometers south with that coal money, a planned city of boulevards and plazas and cultural centers and museums and residential towers, built for a million people, which currently holds somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of that number depending on which estimate you trust and which year you check. When I was there, Kangbashi had the specific silence of a city that expects to be full.

I walked through Kangbashi on a Tuesday afternoon and counted eleven other people on the main civic boulevard in twenty minutes. The boulevard is extraordinary: wide enough for a military parade, lined with sculptures from the Xiongnu period, fountains that run on a schedule no one had explained to me, and public art installations that would not look out of place in a European capital city. In the absence of the crowds they were designed for, the sculptures and fountains had the quality of a set waiting for actors who haven’t arrived yet. I found it genuinely moving, in the way that ambition slightly outrunning reality sometimes is.

The Genghis Khan Mausoleum is forty kilometers northeast, in a place called Ejin Horo Banner, which sounds administrative but has the feeling of something approaching sacred. The mausoleum itself is architecturally unusual — three yurt-shaped domes clad in glazed blue and yellow tile, connected by colonnaded wings, set in a walled compound on a rise of land that commands views across the plateau in every direction. Whether the Great Khan’s actual remains are here is historically contested; Mongolian scholars generally argue they are not, that the real burial site is in what is now the Republic of Mongolia. What is certainly here are the relics — Genghis Khan’s saddle, his bow, his bride’s artifacts — and the offerings that local Mongol families bring on festival days.

I was there on an ordinary afternoon in September and the visitors were mostly Chinese domestic tourists in tour groups, but also clusters of ethnic Mongolians from across the region who moved through the compound differently — slower, quieter, stopping longer at the inner sanctum where an enormous statue of the Khan sits under the central dome surrounded by white silk khatags. One older man in a deel robe stood so still in front of the statue that I thought for a while he was meditating, and then realized he was simply there in a way I was not and could not be.

Back in Dongsheng the food is the reason to linger. The lamb here is different from the lamb in Beijing or Shanghai — raised on the plateau scrubland, grazed on wild herbs, and prepared without the urge to disguise it. A restaurant called Yike Zhao on the main commercial strip does a lamb shank braised with potato and dried chili that arrived in a pot still bubbling and sustained me through an entire afternoon.

When to go: September is optimal — the heat of the plateau summer has broken, the mausoleum hosts its annual Genghis Khan Festival in late August, and the light across the steppe has that particular golden quality that makes everything look like it was painted by someone who knew what they were doing. The Kubuqi Desert to the north is also at its most photogenic in early autumn when the dune light softens at the edges of the day.