Today the area referred to by Marco Polo as Egrigaia is Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, although there have been changes with respect to its size and boundaries.The city of Kalachan was probably the capital of ancient Western Xia Kingdom, and the "camlets"mentioned in his book are apparently a kind of cloth made of camel wool. We, however, saw no camels until we were approaching Inner Mongolia,where customs are more similar than in Ningxia to those he observed over 700 years ago.

This part of our journey took us from Lanzhou north to the Helan Mountains, following the Yellow River. We had actually made a detour by coming to Lanzhou, not on Marco Polo's route.His contingent, escorted by the imperial guards of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), took a short cut along the southern fringes of the Tengger Desert,spending no more than eight days travelling from Wuwei to Yinchuan in Ningxia, a distance of over 500 kilometres.

The Yellow River bathed in the brilliance of the rising sun.

In Lanzhou we rested for some time to refresh ourselves and to overhaul the vehicle that had carried us for over 4,000 kilonetres. We set out early on a September morning, leaving Lanzhou and driving northwards to the town of Zhongwei,where we would pick up the route followed by Marco Polo.

We had lunch at Jingyuan, and while chatting with the restaurant owner, we saw out of the window a drum tower in the town centre. He told us that almost every town in Gansu Province has a drum tower and that they differ from one another only in size and date of construction. We thought back on all the towns we had passed and realized that he was right, in the Hexi area even Yongchang,a tiny town, has a drum tower very much like the one in Jiuquan, although the former is much smaller in size.