The camel caravan tramps along the dunes, each animal carrying a passenger covered up from the sun and wearing orange boot coverings against the sand. But they stop when they reach the road, halted by a dedicated traffic light with an image of a camel flashing red.
There are about 2,000 camels at the Mingsha Mountain outside Dunhuang, an ancient Silk Road oasis at the edge of the Gobi Desert in China’s Gansu province. Each camel, double-humped with a shaggy coat and an extra pair of eyelids that act as windscreen wipers, has a number stitched into the livery of its saddle.
“It’s like a licence plate,” says a guide.
Mingsha Mountain – literally the “singing sand dunes” on account of the sound of the sands when the wind blows – is set off by the Crescent Moon Springs, a clear lake below. Visitors climb to the top of the dunes along a kind of rope ladder of wooden logs between two steel cords.
“We all know that the sand in Mingsha Mountain can sing. But why does this happen?” says Wang Youxia, from the local tourism development company.
“Of course, if we look at the scientific evidence to understand why the sand is singing, we can give you an explanation, but the magic of nature has brought this sound here. Everyone should feel this from the natural environment.”
More than four million people have visited the mountain already this year but fewer than 20,000 of them were from outside China. Even at the nearby Mogao Caves, known throughout the world for their Buddhist murals, foreign visitors are a tiny minority.
There are more than 700 grottos, the oldest of them carved into the rock more than 1,600 years ago, and more than 400 of them have surviving murals. Each cave, kept in darkness to preserve the paintings, admits only 25 visitors at a time led by a guide with a flash lamp to point out the most notable features.
Although the art is religious with Buddha statues and paintings featuring flying asparas, at the bottom of the wall in many caves are paintings of figures dressed in the courtly style of the time they were painted. These are the donors who commissioned the artists and paid for the upkeep of the cave, usually from prominent local families.
The Mogao Caves are themselves an important donor to the local government in Dunhuang because they are the city’s biggest taxpayer. Gansu is one of China’s poorest provinces and with little arable land nearby, Dunhuang is fortunate in enjoying the revenue from tourism, which accounts for about two thirds of its economic activity.
For Zhu Yuming, deputy secretary of the Communist Party municipal committee in Dunhuang, one of the city’s most important challenges is to rebalance its economy.
“Tourism doesn’t contribute a lot in tax. Industry gives a lot of tax to the government,” he says. “Our people are relatively rich in promise but our government is not rich enough. We don’t have much to invest in the city infrastructure or something. Now, we’re trying to develop first-tier industry, second-tier industry, and trying to develop a service industry. But it’s not easy. It’s not easy at all.”
Zhu, a fluent English speaker, was in Ireland this year to visit Dublin and Sligo, which is twinned with Gansu, and he is determined to make more of Dunhuang’s international connections. US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns was in the city this week and other ambassadors and potential foreign investors have come to Dunhuang in recent months.
“We have a sister city in Nepal, three sister cities in Japan, two in Korea, one in Belarus, and one in Sweden,” he says. “But we still don’t have economic co-operation.
“We have people-to-people contacts, we have the exchange of visits, but we don’t have much co-operation. That doesn’t mean we don’t have potential, that we don’t have areas where we can co-operate.”
The desert near Dunhuang is home to some of the most advanced projects in China’s green energy transition, including the world’s biggest cluster of wind farms, and most of the city’s power comes from renewable energy sources. But few of the new energy companies are profitable enough yet to contribute much to the taxation that funds Dunhuang’s public services.
Zhu and his colleagues are focused on maximising revenue and they have a plan to deal with a side effect of China’s contactless retail economy that has been diverting revenue away from the city. Many local businesses have bank accounts in big cities such as Beijing or Shanghai rather than in Dunhuang so when customers use the payment apps WeChat or AliPay, the money never touches down in the city.
“We are trying to develop a Dunhuang code so that our business people can scan this code and the money goes at least through Dunhuang,” he says.
“We will see the money flow, and take advantage of these figures and statistics so we can better improve our tourism.”