The dataset contains detrital zircon U-Pb ages from a large scale detrital provenance study of modern and recent sand and silt from the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) and its proposed sources in the Yellow River, its Tibetan headwaters, and the Taklamakan Desert, which lies upwind from the CLP. (NERC grant NE/I009248/1)

Files contain heavy mineral (HM) and framework petrography data for samples taken from sediments across Northern China, from Tarim in the west to Ordos in central north China. The data come from river, loess, silt and sand sediments from deserts, the Chinese Loess Plateau, major rivers and alluvial fans of ages spanning the Cenozoic to modern. Data are grouped into tables with sample details and data types. Each file pertains to a given paper: Stevens et al., 2013a: doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.11.032 Stevens et al., 2013b: doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.10.014 Bird et al., 2015: doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2015.06.024 Nie et al., 2015: doi:10.1038/ncomms9511 Rittner et al., 2016: doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2015.12.036 Supplementary Material - Contains Hf, Nd and Sr isotopic data from modern, Pleistocene and Pliocene samples from surface and sediment section sediments from Northern China. Including loess, red clay, sandy desert, alluvial fan and river bar and terrace sediments. Samples obtained between 2010 and 2014.