Western Xia Imperial Tombs (西夏王陵)

The Western Xia Imperial Tombs (西夏王陵) are nine conical burial mounds and the most mysterious major archaeological site in China. The Western Xia kingdom - also called the Tangut (Táng wù) - ruled this corner of the northwest from 1038 to 1227, built its own script and Buddhist canon, and then essentially ceased to exist when the Mongols arrived. The tombs are the only way left to see what they made.

Highlights

No. 3 Tomb Mound - The most photogenic of the nine, and one of the few actually opened. The wooden burial chamber was excavated here in the 1970s and its timbers are preserved under a purpose-built roof, so you can stand over the real thing instead of a reconstruction.

The Nine Mounds - Nine emperors, nine mounds, scattered across a wide plain. Most are roped off and you walk between them. Unexcavated cones in dry grass with a highway on the horizon is a genuinely strange sight, and the emptiness is the point.

Western Xia Museum - Built partly underground and partly earth-covered to stay out of sight. It has a reconstructed Tangut hall, a hall of royal tomb finds, and an English-language section that does better than most regional museums this size.

The Spiritual Temple - A small later temple sitting on one of the mounds, which is the clearest sign of how the site changed meaning: royal cemetery first, folk holy ground after.

¥75 ($10.50) covers the mounds, the museum and the shuttle between them. 40 km west of Yinchuan, about 50 minutes by taxi, roughly ¥90-150 ($13-21) one way depending on who you find. No booking needed. Combine with Zhenbeibu on the same westward road if you hire a car for the day.