Pingluo

Pingluo is a county of some 274,000 people in northern Ningxia, administered by the city of Shizuishan and squeezed between the Helan Mountains and the Yellow River irrigation plain. Its economy has long rested on farming - wheat above all, thanks to unusually long hours of sunshine - together with rice, aquaculture and, more recently, coal and chemical industry inherited from the wider Shizuishan basin. The county's showpiece is Sand Lake (Shahu), a national 5A scenic area of open water, reed beds, lotus ponds and drifting dunes that sits about 47 km from Yinchuan and draws birdwatchers and photographers from across China. Pingluo has no university of its own, so young people head 50 minutes south to Yinchuan for Ningxia University and the region's other colleges, but the county town itself is an easy, low-cost base: more than a third of its residents are Hui Muslims, halal food is the norm rather than the exception, and the Qing-era Yuhuang Pavilion and Tianzhou Pagoda give the small centre a real sense of history.