Nobody plans a trip to Hejing. You plan a trip to Bayanbulak, and then you spend a great deal more time in Hejing than you expected, usually because of a road.
I have now been through Hejing County four times and stopped overnight twice, both times involuntarily. On the second occasion I gave up on getting up to the grasslands altogether and spent two days in the county instead, which turned out to be the better trip.
The county nobody describes properly
Hejing is a large Mongol county in Bayingolin Prefecture, stretching from the agricultural flats near Yanqi and Korla up into the Tianshan. Bayanbulak grassland — the famous one, with the Nine Bends of the Kaidu and the swans — is administratively inside Hejing. So the county contains both the plain and the high pasture, separated by a couple of thousand metres of vertical and one mountain road.
The county seat sits down on the plain at around 1,100 metres. Bayanbulak town sits at roughly 2,500. That difference is the entire logistical story of a winter trip here.
The road, and why it is the whole problem
Getting from the county seat to Bayanbulak in winter means climbing the mountain road through the Tianshan. In summer this is a spectacular and busy drive. In winter it is a genuinely serious mountain route that closes.
Let me be specific about what “closes” means, because I have seen this badly reported. The route is not sealed off for the entire winter. It opens and shuts depending on snowfall, drifting and avalanche risk, sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week or more. Local traffic gets through when conditions allow. Tourist vehicles are the first to be turned back at the checkpoints, which is reasonable and also inconvenient.
The G216 north from Bayanbulak towards the Ili side, and the higher passes generally, are far less reliable in winter than the approach from the Korla side. If your plan involves crossing the range in winter, treat that as unlikely rather than probable.
My hard-won rules:
- Do not book non-refundable accommodation up at Bayanbulak more than two days out.
- Build a spare day into the plan on the plain side, in Hejing town or Korla.
- Ask the checkpoint or your driver’s network on the morning of travel. Yesterday’s information is worthless.
- If you get up there, understand that you may not come down on the day you intended.
Everything I have written about Bayanbulak in winter assumes you have solved this problem. how Xinjiang ski weather changes month by month gives the wider seasonal pattern, and if you are weighing up whether the attempt is realistic for your dates, ask us before you commit to the drive.
Balun Terrace, the stop everyone drives past
Roughly ninety kilometres up from the county seat, at about 1,800 metres, is Balun Terrace — Baluntai in Chinese. It is a small mountain town at a rail and road junction, and it holds the Yellow Temple, one of the more significant Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Xinjiang.
I stopped here on my second forced-delay day and it was the highlight of that whole week. The temple in winter, with snow on the roofs and almost no visitors, is quiet in a way that summer visitors do not get. There were monks, there was butter-lamp smoke, and there was a caretaker who spent twenty minutes explaining things to me in Mandarin that I understood perhaps half of.
The town also has the Nanshan mine railway and a genuinely dramatic gorge section of road. If you are stuck, this is where to be stuck.
The county seat in winter
Hejing town is functional and unglamorous: a grid of low blocks, a bazaar, a bus station, a couple of hotels, and shelterbelt poplars along every road. Winter here is dry and cold rather than snowy — the plain gets far less accumulation than the mountains above it, and what falls tends to blow around and disappear.
Two things make it more interesting than it looks. First, it is a Mongol county with a Hui and Uyghur population layered in, so the food is unusually varied for a small county town: Mongol milk tea and boiled mutton, Hui beef noodles, Uyghur bread and kebabs, all within a few streets. Second, the bazaar in winter is a working market rather than a tourist one. I bought dried apricots, wool socks and a hat, and nobody attempted to charge me a foreigner price.
Accommodation is cheap and adequate. Heating is good. Confirm foreign-guest registration in advance, as always in small Xinjiang counties.
What you can actually do here
Honestly? Not a great deal, and that is fine. Hejing is a waypoint and a buffer, not a destination. The realistic list:
Balun Terrace and the Yellow Temple, as above — a solid half-day if the road up that far is open, which it usually is even when the higher route is not. The county museum, small and free and worth twenty minutes for the Torghut material. The bazaar. And the drive itself, which through the lower gorge sections is genuinely beautiful even when you cannot complete it.
There is no ski area in Hejing County. The nearest lift-served skiing is down at the ski areas around Korla, roughly two hours away on the plain. If skiing is the point of your trip, that is where to base, and Hejing becomes a day trip rather than a stay.
Getting in and out
Korla is the gateway: airport, high-speed and conventional rail, and a proper bus network. Hejing town is about a hundred and twenty kilometres west of Korla on the G3012 and G218, and there are frequent buses and shared cars. The county also has a rail station on the southern Xinjiang line, which is useful if you are coming from Urumqi via the Tianshan tunnels.
For the mountain leg, a hired 4×4 with a local driver is the only approach I would recommend. Not a rental you drive yourself, and not a two-wheel-drive car regardless of what the hire company tells you. The general principles in getting around China’s ski regions apply, but this particular road deserves more caution than most.
What the altitude does to you, and to your plans
The vertical gap between the county seat and Bayanbulak is worth taking seriously as a physiological matter, not just a logistical one.
Going from 1,100 metres to 2,500 metres in three or four hours of driving is a fast ascent. It is not Tibet, and most healthy people handle it without drama, but I have twice watched travelling companions get a solid headache and a bad night’s sleep out of it — and once in winter, when you are also cold, dehydrated and eating badly, the combination hits harder than the number suggests.
The practical mitigations are boring and effective. Drink considerably more water than you want to, because the air up there is extraordinarily dry and cold air suppresses thirst. Do not drink alcohol on your first night at altitude, however tempting the baijiu at dinner looks. Eat carbohydrates. And if you have any choice in the matter, sleep the first night in Balun Terrace at around 1,800 metres rather than going straight to the top — a staged ascent costs you half a day and buys you a functional next morning.
The other altitude consequence is temperature. Bayanbulak in January routinely runs fifteen degrees colder than the county seat, and it holds some of the lowest recorded temperatures in Xinjiang outside the far north. Kit that is comfortable down on the plain will not be adequate up there. Pack for the top, not for where you started.
The reframe that made it worthwhile
I spent my first two visits treating Hejing as an obstacle between me and the photographs I wanted from the grasslands. On the third, weathered out again, I stopped fighting it: I got a room, went to the bazaar, drove up to the temple, and had a much better two days than the ones I had planned.
Xinjiang in winter does this repeatedly. The place you were passing through turns out to be the place with nobody in it. Hejing is not going to end up as the headline of anybody’s trip report, but if the mountain road turns you around — and it may well — you are not stranded in a bad place. You are just somewhere quieter than you intended.