Enter from the north side of town
Yanchi county town opens north onto Yanzhou Ancient City, a historic and cultural tourism area in the east of Wuzhong. Changcheng Pass, the Ningxia Great Wall Museum, and Huamachi old town sit in the same dry county as the rammed-earth Ming wall; Yinma Lake lies inside the same park. The area is the core of the county’s Great Wall national cultural park, and it is listed among national 4A scenic sites. From the north side of town the visit runs through the pass, the museum, and Huamachi’s wall—wall country and town in one place.
Rammed earth on the Ming line
Yanchi has walls of the Sui and walls of the Ming. The Ming forts include Huamachi, and Changcheng Pass is a pass named for the Great Wall. The same dry county is Tan sheep country. One Sui wall and three Ming walls still stand here, mostly rammed earth. Much of that earth has worn down to broken banks. Where the old profile survives, it is a deep ditch and a high rampart. A repaired stretch and the Ningxia Great Wall Museum are the parts opened for visits.
The Ming date belongs to the wall lines and to the forts they name. Courtyards rebuilt inside the tourism park belong to the visit the town now offers. The wall itself is rammed earth, a yellow bank in the grass, earth rather than the brick face of the Beijing wall.
A white flock on alkali ground
Tan sheep graze the same dry county, where the Loess Plateau meets the Ordos edge—salty soil, alkaline water, and pasture that includes liquorice. On 18 September 2017 the Yanchi Tan sheep farming system, on the south edge of the Mu Us sandy land, was written into the fourth batch of China Important Agricultural Heritage systems. The system covers 8,522.2 square kilometres. The sheep are a long fat-tailed, coarse-wool breed shaped from Mongolian sheep and kept for pelts and for meat. The name comes from the look of a grazing flock: white bodies on pale ground, like a patch of white alkali.
Closer in, most of the sheep carry brown, black, or yellow patches on the head, a slightly arched nose, and a long triangular fat tail past the hock. The meat is fine-grained and juicy, red, with white fat spread evenly, smooth, and only lightly muttony. Milky white fat; meat that stays tender when stewed in plain water. The county names it as the meat for Ningxia hand-served mutton and for clear-stewed mutton. The Tan sheep mark was registered as a certification trademark in 2005 and approved as a national geographical-indication product in 2016. The county dates the farming system’s entry into the national agricultural-heritage list to June 2017. The wall is the earth bank. The flock is the white patch on the pasture beside it.