Ordos Plateau

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The Ordos Plateau, also known as the Ordos Basin or simply the Ordos, is a highland sedimentary basin in parts of most Northern China with an elevation of 1,000–1,600 m (3,300–5,200 ft), and consisting mostly of land enclosed by the Ordos Loop, a large northerly rectangular bend of the Yellow River. It is China's second largest sedimentary basin (after the Tarim Basin) with a total area of 370,000 km² (140,000 sq mi), and includes territories from five provinces, namely Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and a thin fringe of Shanxi (western border counties of Xinzhou, Lüliang and Linfen), but is demographically dominated by the former three, hence is also called the Shaan-Gan-Ning Basin. The basin is bounded in the east by the Lüliang Mountains, north by the Yin Mountains, west by the Helan Mountains, and south by the Huanglong Mountains, Meridian Ridge and Liupan Mountains.

The name "Ordos" (Mongolian: ) comes from the orda,^[1] which originally means "palaces" or "court" in Old Turkic.^[2][3][4] The seventh largest prefecture of Inner Mongolia, Ordos City, is similarly named due to its location within the Ordos Loop.

The Ming Great Wall cuts southwesternly across the center of the Ordos region, roughly separating the sparsely populated north (or "upper Ordos", which is actually lower in elevation than the "lower Ordos" south) — considered the Ordos proper — from the agricultural south (or "lower Ordos", i.e. northern part of the Loess Plateau). The north Ordos consists mainly of the arid Ordos Desert (subdivided into the Mu Us and Kubuqi deserts), which is administered by Inner Mongolia's Ordos City, but the floodplains along the banks of Ordos Loop's northern bends are fertile grasslands historically known as the Hetao Plains ("river loop" plains), which is subdivided into the "west loop" (within Ningxia) and "east loop" (within Inner Mongolia, further divided into "front loop" and "back loop") sections. The Inner Mongolian cities of Hohhot (provincial capital), Baotou, Bayannur and Wuhai (its third, fourth, eighth and eleventh most populous prefectures respectively), and all of Ningxia's cities except Guyuan, are all located on these riverside plains along the Hetao region. Throughout Chinese history, the Hetao region was of major strategic importance and therefore hotly contested against various Eurasian nomads such as Di and Rong (Shang and Zhou dynasties), Xiongnu (Qin and Han dynasty), Rouran (Northern Wei), Eastern Göktürk (Sui and Tang dynasty) and Mongols (Ming dynasty).

The more populous south Ordos is traversed by the upper reaches of Wei River's two largest tributaries, the Jing and Luo Rivers, whose valleys cut through the mountain ranges east of Tianshui and south of Pingliang, Qingyang and Yan'an to drain into the crescentic Guanzhong Plain on the other side. The south Ordos and the Guanzhong Plain together were one of the cradles of Chinese civilization and remains densely populated throughout history. The largest city in the Guanzhong region, Xi'an, is the 10th largest Chinese city^[5] and the most populous settlement in the entire Northwest China, and had long served as the capital of China in more than a dozen ancient dynasties.

The area is of high archaeological interest. Skeletal remains and artifacts show the Ordosian culture occupied the area in the Upper Paleolithic. The late Neolithic saw the development or introduction of the Zhukaigou culture, which was followed by the iron-wielding Ordos culture.