Heicheng City expanded in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and became an important post house along the road from the Gansu Corridor to the north of Yunling. It was abandoned at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Heicheng has a rectangular shape. With a total length of 470 meters from the east to the west and 384 meters from the north to the south, the total area of the city is 180,500 square meters. There are five pagodas made of original adobe on the 10-meter-high city wall foundations at the northwest corner. The ruins of a pagoda shaped like an overturned bowl still stand at a height of 12 meters. The pagoda can be seen from distance of more than 10 kilometers. It's a symbolic building of Heicheng.

Since it was discovered by a Russian explorer surnamed Potanin in 1886, Heicheng has become a Mecca for worldwide archeologists including P. K. Kozlov, Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin.

After its founding in 1949, China initiated two large-scale archeological research projects in 1983 and 1984 respectively. From then, archeologists excavated hundreds of tombs owned by Muslims of the Yuan Dynasty, crucial to the study of Islamic culture's spread in China.

A great number of rare relics have been found in the ruins of the city, including the earliest moveable-type print and the earliest currency of China -- Jiaozi.