Mangnai

Mangnai is China's newest and most isolated county-level city, established in 2018 in the far northwest of Qinghai where the Qaidam Basin meets Xinjiang; its seat, the oil town of Huatugou, lies 350 km from the nearest other city. The economy is built almost entirely on resources: it is the headquarters area of the Qinghai Oilfield and produces crude oil and natural gas, along with celestite, sodium sulphate and about half of China's serpentine reserves, and it once worked the country's largest asbestos mine. There is no university in Mangnai — the city runs only schools and vocational training tied to the oilfield, so young residents go to Golmud, Xining or coastal provinces for higher education. In the last few years Mangnai has become famous among Chinese travellers for looking less like Earth than anywhere else in the country: the turquoise salt pans of Emerald Lake, the sulphurous Aiken Spring nicknamed the "Devil's Eye", and the wind-carved Eboliang yardang ridges that host a Mars simulation camp.