Under Arrest in Xining – The Western China Police Paranoja

Last Updated on 4 December 2025 by Cycloscope

Datong, Qinghai, China.

I cycle, I’m in the back, and I see Daniele stopped by the military along the way. He had the GoPro on. You can not take pictures here. Okay, so we apologize, turn on the PC, show the latest photos, and delete them. Are you happy?

We think it’s over then, but the guy who stopped us is a little boy who only speaks Chinese; he doesn’t really know what to do.

Call someone, his “boss,” I guess, who speaks a little English. He says we are in a “forbidden” area, but there’s no sign to indicate it, and we are given places of interest everywhere, in English.

After a verbal fight and a nice shove trimmed to one that kept touching the bikes, the boss says we need to do a statement of apology for being there (?), and that’s fine if that’s what they want.

Here comes the police car, escorts us to the office, where we declare our entire itinerary so far, and that we did not know this city was forbidden to foreigners.

Then why have we not yet figured out, probably for the minorities living there, and ghostly military zones about which those cops kept talking?

And there should also be a nuclear power plant nearby, maybe not just a power plant. And then the fact that we passed through Xinjiang doesn’t make them any friendlier.

In fact, in China, you cannot travel on your own; the idea of traveling without organized tours does not fit the government’s idea of tourism.

You are swept up in the tourist locations from X and then Y, but you cannot see what lies between them. At least in this area of China, where minorities are not 100% under control, and military experiments are going on.

Xining – the capital city of the Qinghai region

We spent hours at the police station with the military guy, who served as the interpreter. We write the statement, we sign it, and complete it with a fingerprint.

Ask us at least 4 or 5 times why we came from Xinjiang, and they seem not to understand that this region is 1/4 of China and is the only border you can enter from the west. We keep telling them it is late and that we have to go to Xining before dark, but they do nothing.

In the end, they tell us they’ll bring us to Xining. They look lovely, and they give us water. Well, okay. We think we’re just not allowed to cycle in this city, and that’s it.

They look at the photos taken in recent days, including the one with the smiling cop who apparently was not aware of being in an area forbidden to foreigners. We load all the bikes on a police car, and we are six on it.

We go to Xining and park next to another police officer from the PSB (Public Security Bureau), where we have to renew the visa.

There is a young guy here who speaks English very well and tells us that most of the area is prohibited to foreigners because of the secret military bases.

We thank him for having talked of secret military areas of which we knew nothing before he spoke of them. Weird way to keep secrets. We answer the same questions: why we were there, whether we have maps of military zones, and other such paranoia.

Too many spy movies. And we’re not even American! Then he tells us that we must leave the bikes, passports, and all our electronics (cameras, phones, audio recorder, GPS, HD, laptop, SD cards…) because they must check all our pictures and videos! We tell him that there’s stuff from Italy and that it may take a long, long, long time! No way.

They take us to another part of the office for the declaration/interrogation. The room has a chair where they can tie your hand and foot and there’s a tool to give you the shock to the feet, the room is sound-proof.

They assure us we don’t have to sit there; we are Westerners. But if we were Tibetan or Muslim or anti-government, I don’t know… The torture chamber. In Italy, when the police kill someone, they try to hide it, but here they do not.

They make me sit on a “normal” chair and I answer again the same questions, this time video recorded. Finished the questioning, the policeman accompanied us to the hostel, where we were practically under house arrest until they checked all our photos and videos.

Once before the elevator, the policeman has to run to the bathroom, is as white as a corpse, and sweats! He runs into the bathroom while we check in at the hostel, bad karma.

He says he will call us here tomorrow to tell us when we can take our things back. The next day, no one calls on Friday. Let’s go directly to the police officers, and our “friend” says there’s a lot of stuff to check, who would have thought?

Our things are in another office, which is responsible for monitoring. Maybe he called them the famous Chinese censors’ army, but they did not work over the weekend, so we have to wait until Monday. WTF.

Since they have our passports, we cannot go anywhere. The bikes are there, and we are forced to pay for the hostel. Could accommodate them at least! We’ll have a happy weekend in the capital of Qinghai.

Pork penis at the Hui market in Xining

We pay a visit to the museum of the region, where all the minorities living there are represented, and learn about their traditions and customs, and how happy they are to belong to great China.

The museum is free inexplicably. It’s very lovely, and there is also the story of what they call the Chinese Pompeii: during an ancient flood, a village was submerged, and a few years ago, archeologists found the skeletons of the inhabitants embracing.

Then there are beautiful paintings and other things about the Tu minority that seem quite colorful.

Monday afternoon, the police should let us know something. Waiting for them, we go to the north temple, a Taoist temple nestled in the mountains, which does not even seem that a few meters away, there is the highway and a gray Chinese city.

The atmosphere is very relaxed, and the temple is beautiful, with many grottoes hosting the weird Taoist deities.

Xining must have been once a beautiful city, we saw the old photos in a bar, there were pontoon bridges on the Yellow River running through the city, it is in the mountains and there were beautiful traditional houses.

Everything was razed to build giant apartment blocks, ugly and recognizable only to one another by the vast numbers on their sides. The temple instead gives us a few hours of peace, and we see that the monks here smoke a lot of cigarettes.

The temple is free because it doesn’t seem touristy. In fact, we see around many of the faithful. We climb up to the top, and once we get off, we hear music coming from the temple below.

The monks are doing a ceremony, singing, and playing gongs. We see an authentic ceremony, not for tourists. We are delighted. We leave a small donation to a goddess with a fishtail, hoping she’ll help us.

North (Tolou) temple: a Taoist temple in Xining

Let’s go to the police. We cross the bridge over the Yellow River, which looks really filthy; I dare not imagine what it’s like further downstream. PSB, nothing new, we have to wait at least until tomorrow, maybe Wednesday.

The policeman even admits that it was a mistake by the Chinese Government to have put up a sign warning of the ban on going to that city. We continue to say that our visa expires on July 5 and that we must renew it; otherwise, we cannot get out in time.

Depressed, we go to eat a giant platter of stuff for a few euros. The next day, we went to the Hui market, but we did not take any photos.

The Hui are Chinese Muslims. It’s a nice market, the mosque at the center, selling everything, even pork penises. We eat the steamed dumplings for the first time, I say without meat, and they understand that they are stuffed with carrots, and the delicious pasta resembles steamed bread.

Xining is full of shops selling Caterpillar Fungus. We met several times since Urumqi, and we had not yet figured out what it was. It’s the stuff the nomads tried to sell us after passing a few days ago.

In practice, it is a caterpillar that has died because of a fungus that emerges from its head. Located in the mountains above 3000 msl, it is gathered in May (according to the owner of the hostel) and costs a lot, from 3000 to 50.000$ per kg.

It contributed 8.5% of Tibet’s GDP in 2004.  According to Tibetan medicine, it is good at almost everything, from virility to cancer treatment.

Caterpillar Fungus

Wednesday arrives, and after almost a week at the hostel, we basically run out of money. It’s time to call the Italian Embassy, the guy who answers us is kind.

He says he will try to call the police, but they can not put pressure on. Strangely, after 10 minutes, the police called and said we could collect our things.

When there, the guy takes them from under a sofa. I have the impression that they never left and that no one checked our photos. But for the visa extension, there is no way; they can only extend it until July 15, which is absolutely not enough to get to the Qingdao ferry to Korea.

We also discovered that our visa is of type M, business one, and in theory, it couldn’t even be extended. We contacted Serik of the Kazakh agency, who says he applied for a tourist visa and that it was a mistake by the Chinese embassy. The Chinese say it is the Kazakh agency’s fault for applying for a business visa because it costs less.

We will never know the truth. We go to the station in Xining, and at the shipping office, there is a beautiful girl who, thanks to the translator on the phone, can talk to us.

Here we leave the bikes that will be shipped today to Qingdao while we do the ticket for tomorrow night at 11, today there was no room.

Thirty hours on the hard-seat train will take us across China. We will arrive on July 5 and take a ferry to South Korea, where we can stay for up to three months.

The “out of the path” Buddhist temple is not too far from Xining

Finally, on our last day in Xining, we decided to take a ride out of town to a temple that some guys in the hostel had mentioned. It’s supposed to be an “out of the path Buddhist temple” nested in the mountains some 50 km from the city.  

We, an Irish boy who teaches English, a Chinese/American guy who also teaches English, one of their Chinese students, and a new French friend, Dominique, to whom we talked a lot during those sad days secluded in the hostel.

We took two buses; it took about an hour and a half to get there, and if there hadn’t been someone who spoke Chinese with us, we might not have ever gotten there. On the road, we see the usual new ghost towns.

The temple is unknown to tourists; fortunately, it is free and authentic. The last part of the road is unpaved, but it is asphalt, a sign that soon there will be a parking lot, and you will pay even here.

We buy the yogurt made from yak milk with sugar from some ladies outside the temple. We are at an altitude of 2800 meters. The temple is terrific, in the mountains, and from the top, you see the golden roof of the main temple.

The monks are really lovely, and one of them wants to show us a video in English of a living Buddha, but can not find it on the phone. We are startled to realize that the Chinese girl (the student) does not even know who Buddha is for real.

Around 17 we go. We took a taxi and then the bus back to Xining. We eat a rubbery ball covered with sesame seeds and prepare our things for the next day by train. At 21:45, we take a taxi to the station, and our bikes are now halfway there.