Visitors tune in to melody road

When a visitor surnamed Zhang, from Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, took her family for a drive on a stretch of highway in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, her car's tires began to hum a melody of the grasslands.

"It was so much fun!" she recalled. "I had seen videos online, but experiencing it in person was completely different. The tires rolling over the road created this beautiful tune, and my first reaction was, 'Whoa, it really works!'"

Zhang said she promptly turned around and drove along the stretch again. "It's just too short — I couldn't get enough of it."

What this visitor experienced was the Dada Route's new "musical road" — an 800-meter stretch of road engineered to play a melody through friction when vehicles pass at a steady speed of no more than 50 kilometers per hour.

Located near the western gate of the Asgat Stone Forest scenic area in Hexigten Banner in Inner Mongolia's Chifeng, the musical stretch of road features 12,366 grooves milled precisely in the asphalt.

The "musical road" is the latest addition to the 135-km Dada Route, a highway that offers one of China's most scenic drives. The route winds its way through six distinct landscapes — lakes, grasslands, sandy areas, forests, mountains and the stone forest. It is often described as a "moving encyclopedia of the grassland".

In 2024, the Dada Route was named one of China's most beautiful self-driving routes — the only highway in Inner Mongolia to receive the honor awarded by the Ministry of Transport. It now welcomes more than 3 million visitors and roughly 1 million vehicles each year.

The journey begins at the serene Dalai Nuur Lake, one of Inner Mongolia's four largest inland lakes and a haven for migratory birds.

As the road meanders through the vast Gongger Grassland, the landscape unfolds as an endless expanse of green dotted with grazing herds of cows, sheep and horses.

The route culminates at the Asgat Stone Forest, a 5A-level scenic area — the highest category in China's five-tier tourist attraction rating system — and a world geological park. Formed more than 150 million years ago through volcanic eruptions and glacial movements, the stone forest features towering, layered granite pillars.

Feng Litian, deputy director of the Hexigten Banner Culture, Tourism and Sports Bureau, said that since the "musical road" opened on June 1, around 420,000 trips have been recorded along the Dada Route. More than 80 percent of visitors to the area now arrive by car, he added.