Field guide · Dunhuang, Gansu
About Dunhuang Guide
Who writes these pages, how the prices and rules are checked, what the sponsored links are, and how to tell us when something has changed.
Last verified: October 2026
On this page
Dunhuang Guide is an independent editorial project. It is not a tour agency, it does not sell tickets, and it does not take payment to change a recommendation. What it tries to do is publish the specific, checkable details that decide whether a trip works: the price of a Class A ticket, the minute tickets are released, which station your train actually stops at, and how late the light really holds on the dunes.
Who writes this
Pages are written by Hui, Dunhuang-based writer. Written from Dunhuang, with prices and rules checked against the attraction’s own notices. Corrections are welcome.
First-hand reports are genuinely useful to us. If an English group left at a different time than described, if a fare changed, or if a queue took longer than we say, tell us at trip@dunhuang.guide and we will correct the page.
- Byline
- Hui
- Based in
- Dunhuang, Gansu
- Contact
- trip@dunhuang.guide
- Last full fact-check
- October 2026
How facts are checked
Every figure on this site is checked against one of the sources below.
Dunhuang Academy (敦煌研究院)
Cave openings, conservation status and the rules that apply inside the site.
Mogao Caves booking site (莫高窟参观预约网)
Official ticket classes, daily caps, release times and the annual opening notice. Registration is limited to Chinese citizens holding a mainland Chinese ID; foreign passport holders cannot book here and use Trip.com instead. www.mgk.org.cn ↗
Trip.com
The booking route for foreign passports: live availability of the non-Chinese resident ticket and opening status, plus traveller reports from people who have just been. trip.com ↗Sponsored
National Immigration Administration (国家移民管理局)
Visa-free lists, the 240-hour transit exemption and entry requirements by nationality.
China Visa Application Service Centre (中国签证申请服务中心)
Visa categories, appointment rules and the documents each application needs.
Dunhuang weather station (敦煌市气象站)
Monthly temperature and rainfall normals for the Dunhuang basin.
12306 (China Railway)
Train numbers, timetables and fares, including which station a service really stops at. 12306.cn ↗
Sunset times
Calculated with the NOAA solar algorithm at the Dunhuang coordinates 40.14°N, 94.66°E, then converted to Beijing time.
Sponsored links and independence
Some outbound links are sponsored and marked rel="sponsored"; clicking one may earn this site a commission at no extra cost to you. They are used for the few things an independent traveller has to buy anyway — the Mogao Caves ticket, a room in town and mobile data — and they never change the advice on the page.
Corrections
We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong. Email trip@dunhuang.guide with the page, the sentence and what you saw on the ground. Substantive corrections are applied to the shared facts file and the “last verified” date at the top of the page is updated, so you can always see how current what you are reading is.