Qinghai

Yellow River (Huang He)

Qinghai, Wade-Giles romanization Ch’ing-hai, conventional Tsinghai, sheng (province) of northwestern China. It is bounded to the north and east by Gansu province, to the southeast by Sichuan province, to the south and west by the Tibet Autonomous Region, and to the west and northwest by the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. Qinghai is the fourth largest province-level political subdivision in China in terms of land area, but the sparseness of its population is second only to that of Tibet. The capital is Xining in eastern Qinghai, some 140 miles (220 km) west of Lanzhou in Gansu.

The province derives its name from the large lake, Qinghai Hu (“Blue Lake”), in the northeastern part of the province that is conventionally known as Koko Nor. A historical home of nomadic herdsmen, Qinghai is noted for its horse breeding, and it has earned more recent prominence as a source of both petroleum and coal. Area 278,400 square miles (721,000 square km). Pop. (2020) 5,923,957.