  SONG is a global ground based network of 1 meter telescopes for stellar
time-domain science, an international collaboration involving many countries
across the world. In order to enable a favourable duty cycle, the SONG network
plans to create a homogeneous distribution of 4 nodes in each of the northern
and southern hemispheres. A natural possibility was building one of the
northern nodes in East Asia, preferably on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. During
the last decade, a great deal of effort has been invested in searching for high
a quality site for ground based astronomy in China, since this has been one of
the major concerns for the development of Chinese astronomy. A number of sites
on the plateau have been in operation for many years, but most of them are used
only for radio astronomy, as well as small optical telescopes for applied
astronomy. Several potential sites for large optical instruments have been
identified by the plateau site survey, but as yet none of them have been
adequately quantitatively characterised. Here we present results from a
detailed multi-year study of the Delingha site, which was eventually selected
for the SONG-China node. We also describe the site monitoring system that will
allow an isolated SONG and 50BiN node to operate safely in an automated mode.
