Zanda

Zanda is a county of the Ngari Prefecture in far western Tibet, and it is one of the emptiest inhabited places in China: roughly 8,500 people, about 98 percent of them Tibetan, spread across some 24,600 square kilometres, a density of about a quarter of a person per square kilometre. Its economy is what the high plateau allows - herding sheep, goats and yaks, a little barley farming on the terraces of the Sutlej river, government employment in the small county town of Tholing, and a tourism trade that has grown steadily as the western Tibet driving route has become famous. There is no university, no railway and no airport in the county; students and travellers alike route through Shiquanhe, the Ngari prefectural seat roughly 380 km away, where the nearest airport is located. What makes Zanda extraordinary is history and geology stacked on top of each other: the ruins of the Guge Kingdom at Tsaparang preserve more than 1,400 cave dwellings, houses, watchtowers and pagodas from a Buddhist kingdom that lasted seven centuries until the Ladakhi invasion of 1630, Tholing Monastery founded in 997 by the Guge king Yeshe-O is the oldest monastery in western Tibet, and the Zanda earth forest - vast eroded cliffs of tertiary sediment that look like ruined castles - is regarded as the largest formation of its kind in the world.

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