DgcityThe northwestern city of Yinchuan, best known abroad as the gateway to the Ningxia desert, has opened a new scenic road threaded through its fast-growing wine country, using a national tourism conference to pitch itself as a destination where road trips, rather than single sights, do the work.
The 2026 Tourism Mobility Conference opened in Yinchuan on November 11, drawing more than 500 representatives from coach transport, self-drive travel, RV camping, vehicle rental and the river and coastal cruise sectors. The gathering is organized around how Chinese tourists actually get around once they leave home, a question that has grown in importance as self-drive trips and short rentals eat into traditional group touring.
The host city put its own answer on display. This year Yinchuan completed what it calls the Purple Avenue, a 22.77-kilometer main route matched with 70 kilometers of slow-travel greenways. The road strings together views of Helan Mountain, thousands of hectares of vineyards, a cluster of boutique wineries and the area’s core scenic spots, turning what was once a series of separate journeys into a single drivable itinerary.
The name is a nod to the region’s ambitions. The eastern foothills of Helan Mountain have become China’s most talked-about new wine region, with vineyards benefiting from intense sunlight, gravelly soils and a dry climate that keeps disease pressure low. Visitors can now move between tasting rooms, mountain viewpoints and desert-edge landscapes without retracing highways, while the greenways are meant for cyclists and walkers who want to cover shorter stretches more slowly.
Yinchuan has also regularized six dedicated tourist routes and lets visitors book point-to-point transport between transport hubs and hotels through a local mini-program, an attempt to smooth the awkward first and last miles that often frustrate independent travelers in western Chinese cities.
The conference itself released a series of annual industry reports covering coach services, self-drive and RV camping, tourism rentals, and cruise and excursion boats, alongside the year’s standardization work across national, industry and association standards. The reports map an industry whose edges keep expanding, from intercity coach lines to local car hire, camping grounds and harbor cruises.
Ningxia remains an out-of-the-way choice for first-time visitors to China, most of whom still land in Beijing, Shanghai or Xi’an. For returning travelers, though, the combination of desert, mountain and a genuine wine route is precisely the kind of distinctive itinerary the country’s northwest is now competing on, and better roads are the piece that makes it bookable.
