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Xining
City in Qinghai, China

Xining

Xining is the capital and most populous city of Qinghai province in western China and the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau.

Plan a trip to Xining→From Lanzhou (Yongdeng)

As of the 2020 census, it had 2,467,965 inhabitants, of whom 1,954,795 lived in the built-up area made of 5 urban districts. The city lies in the Huangshui River Valley, also known as Tsongkha, and owing to its high altitude, has a cool climate on the borderline between cool semi-arid and dry winter humid continental.

Get in

Getting to Xining

  1. 01
    Xining Caojiabao Airport
  2. 02
    Xining Railway Station
See

Worth seeing

  1. 01
    Qinghai Art Museum
  2. 02
    Qinghai Provincial Museum
  3. 03
    Qinghai Science and Technology Museum
  4. 04
    Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Natural History Museum
  5. 05
    Xining Museum
Do

Things to do

  1. 01
    Qinghai Grand Theatre
Eat

Where to eat

Xining's main minority groups provide a large portion of the food on offer. The Hui, a broad term for Chinese Muslims, serve up spicy noodles, lamb kababs and flatbread (bing). Tibetan food choices are concentrated around the train station, mostly small places the serve momos and noodles and seat guests on small coaches.

How locals move

Getting around Xining the local way

  • Get inBooking ahead of time is not required, so an easy day trip might be to jump on a bus and see a regional city before catching the last return bus.

From Wikivoyage: Xining, CC BY-SA. Not yet checked by us. Last edited 2026-09.

Text adapted from Wikipedia and Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons (see file page), Wikimedia Commons.