How Did China's Highest Per Capita GDP City Emerge in a Northwestern Desert?

Yes, in 2022, the place with the highest per capita GDP in mainland China was not Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, or Suzhou, but Ordos in Inner Mongolia, hidden in the desert!

Surrounded by the Yellow River on three sides, it has a dry climate and vast sandy areas. Its name means "many palaces," originating from the Mongolian tribe that guarded Genghis Khan's palace and mausoleum, closely tied to Mongolian culture. In modern times, however, Ordos has frequently interacted with neighboring Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Ningxia.

Coal-fired power plants and sand dunes are the epitome of Ordos.

Ordos's wealth comes from underground. It is not only China's top city in coal reserves and production but also holds one-third of the country's natural gas, serving as a critical node in the West-East Gas Pipeline project. Ordos's energy brings wealth to itself and pumps the indispensable "lifeblood" for China's societal functioning.

How big is Ordos's coal production?

Just look at the coal transport railways.

Beyond energy, Ordos's landscape encompasses deserts, sandy lands, lakes, grasslands, and hills. Advancing yellow sand was once the main topic here—it stained the Yellow River, buried fertile fields, and in spring, whipped up sandstorms that swept across half of China, from Inner Mongolia to Beijing and Tianjin.

Located on the south bank of the Yellow River,

Ordos is nonetheless part of the Inner Mongolia Plateau.

Today, the people of Ordos have tamed the sea of sand, transforming it into grasslands and forests. These resilient descendants are both the direct lineage of the tribe that guarded Genghis Khan's mausoleum for 800 years and the offspring of immigrants from neighboring provinces who migrated westward. Ordos is very "Inner Mongolian," yet also "not very Inner Mongolian."

How important are Ordos's "coal and gas" to China?

Ordos is a city built on coal mines—this is not an exaggeration but a statement of fact. After all, coal-bearing areas account for 70% of its land. Nearly 70% of China's energy comes from coal, and nearly 20% of China's coal comes from Ordos. China's affordable products, increasingly robust infrastructure, and even indispensable food all rely on coal.

Mechanized coal mining feels futuristic.

Phasing out coal for clean energy? That makes Ordos even more indispensable. As China's largest natural gas reserve, Ordos sends the majority of its annual output eastward, fueling the daily lives of Hebei, Beijing, and Tianjin. Especially for Beijing, which is phasing out coal-fired power plants, natural gas not only lights stoves for cooking and heats homes against the cold but also generates electricity to illuminate countless households.

Coal mines aren't just underground pits—they include above-ground facilities too.

China's industry cannot function without Ordos's energy, and Ordos's urban development relies on China's industrial progress—the two are inseparable.

In 2001, Ih Ju League became Ordos City, and this frontier town began rapid development. China's steel, cement, and nitrogen fertilizer production successively ranked first in the world, driven by soaring energy demands and rising energy prices. The faster Ordos extracts coal, oil, and gas, the more it feeds into the lifeline of national energy security. The wealth brought by energy swept through once poverty-stricken Ordos, creating countless legends of fortune.

Yike Aobao is the world's largest aobao, very much Ordos.

Photo/Xiao Shao, Image/Tuchong Creative

The wealth from coal mines was quickly funneled into real estate speculation, leading to a local saying: "Every household in real estate, everyone in pawnshops." The frenzy of hot money once fueled skyrocketing consumer desires.

Apart from houses, Ordos people love cars the most, especially off-road vehicles. In 2010, the city had only 1,800 taxis but sold over 2,000 luxury off-road vehicles. Most of the luxury cars seen in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at that time, also bore the "Meng K" license plates. When the coal price plummeted, causing capital chains to break, the city became a goldmine for used car dealers, with bizarre stories like buying a new car for 1.3 million yuan and selling it for 300,000 yuan the next year.

Setbacks accelerate growth, for people as well as cities. Having emerged from its低谷, Ordos now boasts a more mature economic structure and a rationalized consumer market, shedding its former "nouveau riche" label.

The fireworks during the Lantern Festival are an annual highlight.

News of offering 600,000 yuan annual salaries and housing rewards to recruit Tsinghua and Peking University graduates as primary and secondary school teachers may seem like another土豪 splurge at first glance, but it reflects a genuine thirst for education. The extravagance remains, but it’s no longer spent on frivolities. Once labeled a "ghost city," Kangbashi New District has seen rapid advancements in healthcare and education, gradually gaining vitality.

Changes aren’t limited to urban areas—they’ve even reached the desert. To non-experts, deserts worldwide may look the same, but the Kubuqi Desert is an exception. From above, you can see the world’s largest photovoltaic panel array forming a galloping horse.

Solar power generation also helps stabilize the sand.

The howling northern winds have become an advantage for wind power. Solar, wind, and natural gas now serve as raw materials for hydrogen production, which is why Ordos, alongside Shanghai, was selected as one of China’s first "Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle Demonstration City Clusters." Today, Ordos has even rolled out fully electric autonomous mining trucks, straight out of science fiction.

There’s always a sense of complementary beauty.

Ordos has only been a city for 22 years. During this time, it experienced the wealth legend of sudden riches, like a childhood growth spurt, and the pain of泡沫破裂, like adolescent turmoil. Today, Ordos people have shed the brashness of promises like "If you get into a Beijing university, we’ll buy you an apartment inside the Fourth Ring Road," yet their lives are more prosperous and stable.

The most Inner Mongolian, yet the least Inner Mongolian.

Contrary to the stereotype of being culturally shallow nouveaux riches, Ordos people lead colorful lives, thanks to the region’s complex history and diverse culture born from the convergence of farming and herding.

Camel caravans have become a staple of desert tourism in Inner Mongolia.

Once, the Ordos Plateau witnessed the grand history of trade, war, and cultural exchange between nomadic and agrarian civilizations. It was a frontier county for the Qin and Han dynasties resisting the Xiongnu, a vassal state for surrendered Xiongnu tribes, a contested pastureland during the Sixteen Kingdoms period, a battleground between the Sui-Tang dynasties and the Turks, and a royal fiefdom in the Yuan Dynasty. Too much grand history has passed through here, leaving only sighs like "Pity the bones by the Wuding River, still dreamed of by lovers in spring." Modern Ordos took shape during two waves of immigration in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Cattle, not sheep, are the most important livestock for Mongolians.

In the Ming Dynasty, the Ordos tribe of the Mongols arrived, giving the plateau its enduring name. As descendants of Genghis Khan’s guards and tomb keepers, they made this the "most Inner Mongolian" city in Inner Mongolia. Guarding the Genghis Khan Mausoleum, they also preserve Mongolian sacrificial culture,礼仪 traditions, and court music.

Genghis Khan Mausoleum祭祀 activities in Ordos.

It was Mongolian historical works like "The Origin of the Mongols," "The Golden History of the Mongols," and "The Outline of Mongolian History," compiled or流传 by the Ordos tribe, that saved the grandeur of Mongolian history from oblivion. The horsehead fiddle, whose melodies evoke vast grasslands, evolved from the Yuan Dynasty’s horse-tail fiddle. Wushen Banner in Ordos is known as the "Cultural Capital of the Horsehead Fiddle."

Horsehead fiddle performances on the grasslands are particularly mesmerizing.

Without the Albas goats bred by Mongolians, there would be no鄂尔多斯 cashmere warming the world. China’s status as the "global leader in cashmere" was established in Ordos and its surrounding areas. Here, cashmere transformed from奢侈的 Kashmir into diverse and affordable sweaters. Cashmere was once Ordos’ calling card.

Hand-spinning wool and cashmere is a common tradition in pastoral areas.

The Han Chinese in Ordos are mostly descendants of immigrants from the "Westward Migration" in the late Qing Dynasty. Located at the intersection of Shanxi, Shaanxi, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia, their origins are particularly diverse, leading to noticeable differences in dialects across different districts. The accent in Jungar Banner leans more toward Shanxi dialect, while Otog Front Banner and Uxin Banner carry a stronger Shaanxi Yulin flavor, and Dalad Banner's dialect is closer to that of Baotou. At the same time, these dialects are generally influenced by Mongolian, featuring a distinctive "rising-then-falling" tonal pattern.

Sour porridge is a memory of the older generation, but younger people may not necessarily enjoy it.

Ordos cuisine is also highly eclectic, featuring Mongolian-style meat and blood sausages, sour rice and buckwheat bowls common in northern Shanxi, rice jelly with Gansu and Ningxia flavors, and stewed dishes characteristic of western Inner Mongolia. At gatherings, the banquet table typically starts with cold dressed sand leeks, followed by grilled lamb chops as the main course, and then fried yellow millet cakes as dessert. Whether it's the cultural exchange between Mongols and Han or the transformation of deserts, grasslands, and farmland over time, it all finds its way to the dining table.

Cold dressed sand leeks are a common appetizer in the northwestern regions.

The history of Ordos is half the history of desert control.

It was the formation of the "Great Bend" that defined the modern Yellow River, and it is also this bend that separates the Ordos Plateau from the Inner Mongolia Plateau, which shares similar climatic conditions, while connecting it to the Loess Plateau.

The Wuding River section in Otog Front Banner is as desolate as a frontier poem.

Though surrounded by the Yellow River on three sides, Ordos is far from a water-rich landscape. The river's benefits enjoyed by the "Jiangnan beyond the Great Wall" on the opposite bank do not extend here. Too close to the inland, rainfall is already scarce, and the high evaporation rate from the exposed land makes it impossible to retain water. The plateau stands so high—300 to 500 meters above the river—that even the Yellow River cannot replenish its groundwater. Dryness is visitors' first impression and the root of many challenges here.

Because the riverbanks are so much higher than the Yellow River, it's difficult to implement irrigation projects like those in the Hetao Plain on the north shore. The fertile, sediment-rich Yellow River water flows right past, yet it's nearly impossible to use it to transform this arid climate and barren soil. Despite being bordered by the Yellow River on three sides, farmland accounts for only 4.6% of Ordos' total area, with 70% of it being low- to medium-yield fields concentrated in the northeastern hilly regions.

The formation of the Kubuqi Desert has limited connection to human activity,

so the focus of control efforts is on preventing its expansion.

Though high, the Ordos Plateau is not flat. It features small floodplains shaped by the Yellow River, rolling hills, and vast, endless Gobi deserts. Among them, the Kubuqi Desert in the northwest and the Mu Us Sandy Land in the southeast cover nearly 50% of the land, serving as the key to understanding Ordos.

The Kubuqi Seven Star Lake Desert Scenic Area,

Sandy land and desert are not the same. For humans, deserts seem eternal, while sandy lands can undergo dramatic changes—from grassland to desert—within a century. Small wetlands like Hongjiannao, Honghaizi, and Chagan Nur scattered across the desert grasslands are the best evidence of such transformations.

However, due to climate change, overgrazing, and unsustainable farming practices, the Mu Us Sandy Land expanded relentlessly, trapping locals in a vicious cycle where more reclamation efforts led to greater poverty. Just as "Yinken Tala" means "harmonious grassland" in Mongolian, it is now a stretch of sandy land.

Deserts can also become popular tourist destinations.

Since the early 20th century, Ordos has vigorously pursued desert control. In the most severely desertified areas, horse carts and shoes would sink into the sand. Workers went barefoot, carrying over 50 kg of saplings into the scorching desert, stabilizing the sand with straw checkerboards. As the economy developed, locals buried water pipes in the desert to improve sapling survival rates, leading to a continuous stream of new technologies.

Today, 70% of the Mu Us Sandy Land and 25% of the Kubuqi Desert have been brought under control. Once blanketed in yellow sand, Ordos now has 30% of its land covered by forests, and the springtime sandstorms are a thing of the past.

Along the Ordos desert highways, straw checkerboards for sand fixation are a common sight.

The Kangbashi New Area, built between the desert and sandy land, was once criticized as a "ghost city" due to low occupancy rates. In reality, Kangbashi is not just a modern garden city rising from barren land—it also serves as a barrier preventing the Kubuqi Desert and Mu Us Sandy Land from merging. Today, standing in Kangbashi during spring or summer, the endless horticultural greenery and vibrant "flower fountains" make it hard to believe the city lies between sandy zones.

A decade ago, as China's economy shifted and coal prices declined, pessimistic voices about Ordos were rampant. However, Ordos not only boasts abundant energy reserves but also offers the captivating landscapes of Inner Mongolia worth experiencing. Having proactively planned its economic transformation early on, it soon underwent a remarkable rebirth and returned to its peak. The legend of Ordos is far more than the simplistic phrase "sheep, coal, rare earth, and natural gas."

Ordos deserves a vibrant future.

Cover photo | Visual China

Header photo | Visual China

Without being "starred," the full cover cannot be displayed.

Please light up the "star" to show your support.