At the northeastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau lies one of the most extreme and least-touched landscapes on Earth: a rolling expanse of high-altitude steppe, alpine lakes, and permafrost sitting almost entirely above 4,500 meters, where temperatures stay below freezing for much of the year and almost no permanent human population exists. Hoh Xil (also known as Qinghai Hoh Xil, or Kekexili) protects the complete migratory range of the Tibetan antelope, one of the plateau's most iconic and most endangered mammals, and was inscribed as a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site in 2017 — the culmination of a conservation battle fought, quite literally, with gunfire in the 1990s.
Hoh Xil's ecological value comes from its extremity. The reserve spans 3,735,632 hectares, with a further 2,290,904-hectare buffer zone, making it one of the largest protected wilderness areas in Asia. Because conditions here are so harsh and access so limited, the plateau has developed an unusually high degree of endemism: more than a third of the plant species found in Hoh Xil occur nowhere else, and essentially all of its herbivorous mammal species are unique to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau ecosystem. The landscape also contains one of the densest concentrations of high-altitude lakes on the planet, remnants of ancient inland seas that have shaped the region's unusual hydrology.