China’s Xixia Imperial Tombs Join the World Heritage List
The necropolis of the Tangut emperors near Yinchuan, with nine mausoleums and 271 tombs, was inscribed on 11 July 2025 as China's 60th World Heritage site.
The Xixia Imperial Tombs, at the foot of the Helan Mountains in Ningxia, in north-west China, were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List on 11 July 2025, at the session of the World Heritage Committee held in Paris. They became China’s 60th World Heritage site.
The Xixia, or Western Xia, was a state founded by the Tangut people that ruled a large part of north-west China from 1038 to 1227, controlling a stretch of the Silk Road between the Song empire to the east and the peoples of Central Asia and Tibet. It had its own script, modelled on Chinese characters but unreadable to Chinese speakers, and a culture that combined Chinese, Tibetan and steppe traditions with a strong Buddhist faith. It was destroyed by the armies of Genghis Khan, so thoroughly that its history was largely lost until archaeologists began work in the 20th century.
The necropolis lies about 30 kilometres west of Yinchuan, the regional capital, on a gravel plain between the mountains and the Yellow River. It covers some 40 square kilometres and contains nine imperial mausoleums and 271 subordinate tombs of nobles and officials, together with the remains of a group of buildings and 32 structures built to divert floods from the mountains. Each imperial tomb was a walled enclosure with gates, towers and halls. What survives above ground are the cores of the tomb towers, tall cones of rammed earth, weathered to the colour of the desert, that once carried tiled wooden eaves. They are often compared to pyramids.
UNESCO described the site as a testament to the fusion and interaction of different cultural traditions and to the role of the Xixia in exchanges along the Silk Road from the 11th to the 13th century. It is the largest and best preserved archaeological site of the dynasty.
Ningxia is little visited by travellers from abroad. Yinchuan is two hours by air from Beijing, and the region offers, besides the tombs and their museum, rock carvings in the Helan Mountains, the dunes of the Tengger Desert and, on the eastern slopes of the mountains, the vineyards that have made Ningxia the leading wine region of China. It is one of the places considered in OKYTO’s feature on travelling in China beyond the big cities.