The Most Beautiful Places in Gansu
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Gansu are Mogao Caves, Zhangye Danxia Geopark and Crescent Lake. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Gansu is a long, narrow province stretched along the Hexi Corridor, the passage between the Tibetan Plateau and the Gobi Desert through which the Silk Road ran. For centuries caravans, monks and armies moved along this strip of oases, and with them came Buddhism from Central Asia, which left cave temples carved and painted into the cliffs. The landscape changes from Tibetan grassland in the south to dunes and coloured sandstone in the dry northwest.
The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang hold hundreds of grottoes painted and sculpted over about a thousand years, and one of them, the sealed Library Cave, preserved tens of thousands of manuscripts. Maijishan Grottoes cling to a solitary rock near Tianshui, reached by walkways strung across its face, and at Bingling Temple, statues and niches line a canyon above the Yellow River. At Labrang Monastery in Xiahe, one of the great monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism, monks still study in its colleges.
Nature is equally striking. In the Zhangye Danxia Geopark, layers of red, orange and yellow sandstone form striped hills that change colour with the light. Outside Dunhuang, the Singing Sand Dunes rise high enough to hum when sand slides down them, enclosing the small Crescent Lake in a hollow. Further west, Jiayuguan, the great fort at the western end of the Ming Great Wall, guards the corridor between mountains and desert.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mogao Caves | Cave | ✓ |
| 2 | Zhangye Danxia Geopark | Protected area | |
| 3 | Crescent Lake | Oasis | |
| 4 | Maijishan Grottoes | Cave | ✓ |
| 5 | Labrang Monastery | Monastery | |
| 6 | Singing Sand Dunes | Dune | |
| 7 | Jiayuguan | Fortress | |
| 8 | Bingling Temple | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 9 | Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark | Urban park |
01 Mogao Caves
People's Republic of China · 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037° N 94.804° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zhangzhugang · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Mogao Caves are among the richest treasure houses of Buddhist art anywhere.
Did you know? Wang Yuanlu broke into the hidden chamber on 25 June 1900, and its documents span roughly six centuries, from 406 to 1002.
02 Zhangye Danxia Geopark
People's Republic of China · 27.5 km from Zhangye38.916° N 100.133° E
Image by eltonjohn1973 from Pixabay In the foothills of the Qilian Mountains, on the old Silk Road corridor of Gansu province in north-west China, the hills are painted in stripes. Bands of red, orange, yellow, cream and grey-green run across ridges and gullies, folded and tilted so that each hill carries its own pattern.
Did you know? The term danxia, meaning vermilion sunglow, was coined in 1928 and borrowed from a third-century poem by Cao Pi.
03 Crescent Lake
People's Republic of China · 6.3 km from Dunhuang40.087° N 94.669° E
Image by nhluoj from Pixabay Crescent Lake has sat inside a sea of shifting sand dunes for at least two thousand years of recorded history without being swallowed by them, and the explanation is pure aerodynamics.
Did you know? Local lore names three treasures of the spring: iron-backed fish, seven-star grass and sand of five colours.
04 Maijishan Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 29.1 km from Tianshui34.350° N 106.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
MarsmanRom · CC BY-SA 3.0 The rock at Maijishan is too soft and crumbly to hold fine carved detail, so instead of cutting figures directly from the cliff the way sculptors did at Longmen or Yungang, Maijishan's artisans built their statues up from clay modeled over wooden or stone armatures and then painted them — a technique that let them…
Did you know? The earliest dated inscription at the site, from the year 502, records the excavation of what is now numbered Cave 115.
05 Labrang Monastery
People's Republic of China35.194° N 102.505° E
No machine-readable author provided. Mrfish33~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 In a valley of the Daxia River, on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, Labrang is less a single monastery than a monastic town: a dense cluster of whitewashed halls, chapels, colleges and monks' quarters, crowned with gilded roofs and surrounded by long galleries of prayer wheels that pilgrims turn as they…
Did you know? Labrang traditionally counted 108 branch monasteries, in fact more, spread from Gansu and Qinghai to Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Shanxi and Beijing.
06 Singing Sand Dunes
People's Republic of China · 6.5 km from Dunhuang40.085° N 94.675° E
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Singing Sand Dunes rise directly behind the oasis town of Dunhuang, at the edge of the Kumtag Desert in Gansu: a range of sharply crested dunes that stretches for about 40 km, the highest point reaching around 250 m.
Did you know? Under the Eastern Han dynasty the range was known as Shajiao Shan, the Sand Horn Mountain.
07 Jiayuguan
People's Republic of China · 7.5 km from Jiayuguan City39.801° N 98.216° E
Image by elvisyu from Pixabay At the narrowest point of the Hexi Corridor in Gansu, between desert and the snow-capped Qilian Mountains, a fortress of rammed earth and brick marks the western end of the Ming dynasty Great Wall.
Did you know? The inner fort's two gates are called Guanghua in the east and Rouyuan in the west, and each is shielded by an enclosed barbican.
08 Bingling Temple
People's Republic of China · 26.8 km from Linxia City35.806° N 103.044° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 In a side canyon of the Yellow River, where sheer cliffs rise above the water, hundreds of Buddhas look out from niches and caves cut into the cliff.
Did you know? Cave 169 began as a natural cavern in the cliff, which craftsmen reinforced and fitted with carved niches rather than cutting it from scratch.
09 Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark
People's Republic of China40.531° N 93.064° E
- UNESCO Global Geopark
Dcpeets · CC BY-SA 4.0 Northwest of the old Jade Gate, where the Silk Road left China for the western deserts, wind has carved a dry lakebed into a fleet of clay ridges. Long, keel-shaped mounds stand in rows across the gravel plain, all pointing the same way, like ships moored in a sea that disappeared long ago.
Did you know? The Chinese name for these landforms, yadan, was borrowed from the Uyghur form of the same Turkic word.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Gansu?
- On our list, Mogao Caves ranks first, followed by Zhangye Danxia Geopark and Crescent Lake.
- What was found in the Library Cave at Mogao?
- Sealed around the early eleventh century and opened in 1900, the Library Cave held tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and printed texts in many languages, including the Diamond Sutra of 868, the earliest dated printed book.
- Why are the Zhangye Danxia mountains striped?
- The colours come from layers of sandstone and siltstone laid down over millions of years with different minerals. Tectonic uplift tilted the layers and erosion exposed them as bands of red, yellow and orange.
- Why do the dunes at Dunhuang sing?
- When dry sand slides down the steep faces of the Mingsha dunes, the friction of the moving grains produces a low humming or booming sound, which gave the Singing Sand Dunes their name.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Gansu?
- In our collection, the places in Gansu are most often archaeological sites (3), caves (2), dunes (1) and lakes (1).
- How many places are on this list in Gansu?
- The list covers 9 places.