Beijing from an office window.

Loess is the main reason for Beijing’s haze. When the sky looks milky where there are no clouds, and the haze is consistent from the ground to the tops of skyscrapers, this is loess.

I pronounce it Lois–how ’bout you?

I had to see a lot of the stuff before I grasped that it is Dirt Fog, microscopic particles of earth in the air. Once kicked up, they have great hang time.

If you want to see loess more often than in Beijing, then go to XiAn. Nobody goes to XiAn for the air. It’s not a place that doctors recommend to rich people with respiratory difficulties.

At the power plants on the fringes of town are piles of soft coal as large as Han burial mounds. The city always has a lot of heavy industry because its inland location is harder to bomb, and there are a lot of mines upwind.

I remember that tour groups often came down with throat infections in XiAn. Pollution seems to taste much harsher when added to a broth of loess. It’s not an unusual type of dirt, many countries have it, but midwestern China is the place where it turns to earthen vapor and hazes up the view for hundreds of miles downwind. Rain doesn’t seem to clear it from the the air. Spring winds bring out the most loess, and in a bad year, people in Korea see a few months of XiAn sky. It’s exactly the same color.

“Not a lot of blue-sky days in XiAn,” observed one taxi driver as we passed through an area that smelt like a tire-burning party. Visibility was poor in the city and the surrounding countryside, and the air had a sting to it. Atmospheric conditions were much better when I returned to XiAn a few weeks later; the sky was blue up in the middle, the air much fresher.

The old train station in XiAn is plastered with fine dirt. People must spend a lot of time sweeping and dusting; when I bought a souvenir, I took it back to the hotel and washed the grit out of the little statue’s ears.

While loess is a problem for housekeeping and breathing, I later discovered a few uses for the stuff in in it’s silty, palpable form. If your hands are oily or greasy, for example, and you don’t want to touch your camera, rub some loess on them. It works better than a towel. If you have been scratched by a particularly vicious desert plant, smear the wound with wet loess, which makes a fine salve.

People cover brick homes with loess as a form of insulation. Emperors had the stuff piled into huge mounds for their tombs. It makes walls for farm fields. Parts of the Great Wall of China were constructed from it. The soil is just easy to dig in.Traveling between Gansu and XiAn by bus, we passed thousands of handmade caves, some of which have windows, doors, courtyards–even addresses. There are societies carved into the dirt by the train tracks, with manmade craters for orchards, gardens, fields and homesteads. Terraces run up to the tops of the hills. They dig deep valleys for roads. They dig canals and conduits for irrigation and transportation. People have been altering the landscape intensively for ages, and it shows.

When the climate was more beneveolent, the loess plateau was good for farming. It used to be one of the most prosperous regions, one of the places where culture originally flourished. Partly as a result of human activity, the climate and growing conditions changed, after which the center of Chinese culture moved to the lush south, and people of the loess plateau turned to terraces, irrigation and water conservation. My former boss, a card-carrying Communist who majored in Chinese, told me that just before I left.

A Loess Plateau tour is also a climate-change tour!

I didn’t sleep well on the train, and I taught sniffling children who had summer colds for a few weeks before the trip–kids love learning about viruses, as it strengthens their immune systems, right? After a day in XiAn, I came down with a cold and decided to leave the city early. When I got to Ningxia Province, much higher up on the plateau, a place downwind only from desert and grasslands, the air was dry but clear, the sky was blue, the night had stars, and, thanks to altitude, temperatures were ideal every day. Seriously, you will not find a more comfortable summer climate than in Ningxia or eastern Gansu.

With loess, less is best.

It was a painless sort of cold, the only problem being that it caused ridiculous congestion problems in the passages through which I like to transmit air in a process known as breathing.

My original itinerary included an area near the source of the Yellow River, high up on the Qinghai Plateau, where the base of a mountain might be as high as 3000 meters and the peaks routinely reach 5000 meters, not an oxygen-rich environment. The residents are nearly all Tibetans (if you want to see real Tibetan culture the easy way, go to Sichuan, Gansu or Qinghai–so much closer and more accessible than Lhasa). This would have added two days of trains and two days of old buses on bad roads.

Then I read online about travelers headed for Tibetan areas who were literally escorted off of buses, the authorities telling them that there were safety concerns.

Since I couldn’t confirm that this area was open to visitors, and I didn’t want to be the nose-blowing foreigner enclosed with innocents on a small bus, the double plateau tour became a loess plateau tour, which was just a crying shame. Qinghai would have been great. But things worked out, as Ningxia had a beautiful mountain range with surprisingly abundant wildlife, prehistoric rock carvings and vestiges of a kingdom that made the mistake of pissing off Ghengis Khan, of all people.

Air was clean, weather was perfect (go there if you have a cold and still want to have a good time), prices were very low, even in the provincial capital of Yinchuan.

Yinchuan is more interesting than Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Wuhan, QIngdao…but I only saw one other foreigner there (and only two foreigners in all of Ningxia Province). There were lots of Chinese travelers, but not enough to drive up prices or make you feel crowded anywhere you went.