Ordos

The plateau inside the Yellow River loop has been contested between herders and farmers for millennia. Fossils and stone tools from the Salawusu valley in the south of the municipality record human occupation tens of thousands of years ago, and the bronze belt plaques, knives and animal-style ornaments known as Ordos bronzes come from the Xiongnu and their neighbours in the first millennium BC. The Qin and Han built defences here, and later dynasties pushed their frontier back and forth across the same ground.

The region takes its name from the Ordos Mongols, whose duty for centuries was to guard the Eight White Yurts, the portable shrine containing relics associated with Genghis Khan. The shrine moved with them across the plateau and was finally given a permanent home at Ejin Horo in the domed complex built there between 1954 and 1956; its relics were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and replaced with replicas in the 1980s. The Great Wall runs along the southern and eastern edge of the plateau, and under the Qing and the Republic farmers from Shaanxi and Shanxi moved onto the grazing land, a process that reshaped both the population and the ecology.

Ordos was a poor prefecture of shifting sand and small mining towns until the 2000s, when demand for coal, gas and rare minerals transformed it. Coal money paid for a new administrative district, Kangbashi, begun about 20 kilometres from the old town of Dongsheng; its scale and its empty streets made it internationally famous as a ghost city around 2010, and the collapse of a local informal lending boom made matters worse. Schools, offices and residents followed over the following decade, and the city now presents itself as a centre of coal chemicals, cashmere and renewable energy.

The city's identity is bound up with the Genghis Khan shrine. The Darkhad, the hereditary caretakers to whom the shrine was entrusted, conduct sacrifices through the year at Ejin Horo, and the cycle of ceremonies, with milk offerings, chanted prayers and processions, is among the most distinctive living traditions in Inner Mongolia. Mongol visitors come from across China and from the independent state of Mongolia to take part.

Ordos Mongol culture has its own dress, songs and wedding ritual. The Ordos wedding, a long sequence of blocked doors, riddles, songs and feasting, is performed at festivals and staged for visitors; the local folk songs and the short, quick Ordos dance style are taught in schools. Wrestling, horse racing and archery fill the summer naadam on the banner pastures, and the horse remains a strong symbol in a city that puts bronze horsemen in its squares.

The rest of the population is Han Chinese, much of it descended from Shaanxi and Shanxi farmers who moved onto the plateau within the last few generations, and their dialect, opera and noodle cooking are just as present as the Mongol tradition. Ordos also has a reputation within China for sudden wealth, expensive cars and famously large weddings, a stereotype residents meet with a mixture of amusement and irritation. Cashmere is a point of local pride, and wool textiles remain one of the pillars of the local economy.

About 2.2 million people live in the prefecture-level city, spread between Dongsheng, which holds some 570,000 of them, Kangbashi, the banner towns and the mining districts. Dongsheng holds most of the older population and the daily commerce; Kangbashi, planned for far more people than it first attracted, now runs schools, hospitals and offices and has a settled if thinly spread population. Distances are large and nearly every household depends on a car.

Coal underpins everything: about a sixth of China's coal reserves lie under the prefecture, and it produces something like a sixth of the national output. Open-cast and deep mines in Jungar and other banners feed power stations, coal-to-chemical plants and the rail lines east; natural gas, cashmere processing and, increasingly, wind and solar farms and data centres make up the rest. Ordos has one of the highest levels of output per head of any Chinese city, and also one of the most exposed, since a fall in coal prices reaches every part of the local economy.

Everyday life is quiet, spacious and strongly seasonal. Heating runs for half the year, dust arrives with the spring winds, and summer evenings fill the barbecue streets and riverside parks. Water is the long-term constraint on the plateau, and desertification control, mine rehabilitation and the resettlement of herding families off degraded pasture have all been part of policy here for decades.

The Ordos table is Mongol at its core and northern Chinese around the edges. Mutton is the measure of a meal: shouba rou, boiled on the bone and cut with a knife at the table; whole roast lamb for a banquet; skewers rolled in cumin and chilli; blood sausage and offal eaten in winter; and hotpots of thin slices cooked in plain broth. Local lamb is sold across China on the strength of the grazing.

The white foods run alongside them. Milk tea, salty and often thickened with fried millet and butter, is served at any hour, and dairy shops sell milk skin, milk tofu, dried curds and clotted cream. Fried dough pieces, bortsog, accompany the tea, and milk spirits appear at celebrations.

Migrants from Shaanxi and Shanxi brought the grain cooking of the loess country: oat-flour noodles steamed in honeycomb rolls, buckwheat and potato dishes, hand-cut wheat noodles with vinegar, and steamed buns of every shape. Suanfan, a lightly soured millet porridge, is an old western Inner Mongolian dish still eaten in country households. Melons, sunflower seeds and sea buckthorn come from the irrigated land along the Yellow River, beer accompanies summer grills, and baijiu is poured at any formal dinner.