タグ: Western China

Sands of Time–China’s Taklamakan Desert

inhospitable : adjective 

1: not showing hospitality : not friendly or receptive

2: providing no shelter or sustenance an inhospitable environment

Merriam-Webster.com

From all accounts, China’s Taklamakan Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Bordered by the Kunlun Mountains to the south, the Pamir Mountains to the west, the Tian Shan Mountains to the north, and the Gobi Desert to the east, the Taklamakan is often referred to as the “sea of death” or the “place of no return.”

The Taklamakan, which occupies 330,000km2 in China’s westernmost Xinjiang Uighur region, has an annual rainfall from 38-10mm, and temperatures that range from 400C to -200C. The topography consists of constantly-shifting sand dunes that can range from a height of around 240m to around 500m.

Wildlife, such as it is, consists of Camels, wild asses, foxes, wolves and gazelle. The peoples of the area are Uighurs of Turkic origin and Han Chinese. In ancient times peoples of all ethnicities transversed the area. Between 2005-2009, archeologists excavated a desert site called Xiaohe where they found almost perfectly-preserved mummies of people of Caucasian origin from an estimated 2000 BCE.

In modern times the People’s Republic of China has built roads across the vast emptiness of the Tarim Basin and the Taklamakan, but it ancient times travelers along the Silk Road avoided a direct crossing and skirted the desert on either a northern or southern route. A main Oasis on the fringe of the desert was Kashgar, which remains important today as a Chinese gate to Pakistan and a key station on the modern Silk Road.

From an economic standpoint, the only significant activity connected with this area is the Tarim Basin Oilfield which is rated as China’s 4th largest and covers an estimated 560,000km2. Yields of crude oil exceeding 5 million tons have been reported by PetroChina for the Tarim Oilfield. In addition, the company reports supplying 25 billion m3of natural gas annually.

Several companies offer tourists a chance to explore a part of this vast desert wilderness by road. There is only one report of a brave soul, a Korean man, who crossed the desert on foot in modern times.

Visiting the Taklamakan might not be an ideal vacation, but it would certainly be an adventure. Times change, trends come and go, but places like this (despite the shifting sands) seem to change little as the centuries go by.

photo: Aftab Uzzaman via flickr

China’s Remote 3000km-Long Kunlun Mountains.

                         by David Parmer / Tokyo

Sometimes we speak of far-away places as being “at the ends of the Earth.” That is, they are far away from what we consider to be civilization, are hard to get to, sparsely populated and may contain natural beauty in abundance. One place that would surely fill those requirements would be China’s remote Kunlun Mountains.

Stretching from west to east for 3,000 kilometers, they touch the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan in the west and extend eastward to the edge of the North China Plain. The Kunlun Mountains also act as a border between the Tibet Plain and the Tarim Basin, which includes the Taklimakan Desert and Qinghai.

 

The Kunlun Mountains are a majestically beautiful but unforgiving environment; they are both arid and frigid in turns and are known for their extremely high winds. While there is more vegetation at lower altitudes, they are basically rock desert with not much growing there.  

Despite the harsh conditions there is both wildlife and human inhabitants. The mountains are host to the Tibetan Gazelle, Tibetan Goat, wild yaks, Ibex, wolves, and even some brown bear. There are Mongol herders in the Qiadam Basin area who keep horses, sheep, and yak and Tibetan nomads in the Qinghai Lake region. Wildlife was under threat from over-hunting and poaching, but efforts are being made to preserve the ecosystem.

Perhaps because of their inaccessibility, the Kunlun Mountains have played a large part in people’s imagination and mythology. They were first thought to be a Taoist paradise, and King Mu ( 976–­922 BCE) was said to have visited the area and found the Jade Palace of the Yellow Emperor. Legend has it that even the Queen of Sheba eventually ended up among the Kunlun peaks. In modern times the 1933 novel by James Hilton, Lost Horizonhad its mythical city of Shangri-La located in the Kunlun Mountains. There is also a fictional martial arts school called Kunlun Sect that appears in Heaven Sword Dragon Sabre by Jin Yong, and a real martial arts school that still exists called Kunlun Fist.

Physics, philosophy, and common sense tell us that nothing lasts forever, and change is the only constant. This may be true, yet China’s Kunlun Mountains seem to exist in a time frame beyond our everyday understanding and comprehension.

Map: Wikimedia 

Photo: Kunlun Mountains, Yusheng Bai via flickr