Climate & Weather Report

Introduction

Lying in the center of the Turpan basin is the Flaming Mountains which extends a hundred kilometers from east to west and dozens of kilometers from north to south. "Tuztag" in Uygur means red rocks, for the dark red sandstone, hazy and glowing under the blazing sun, resembles a mountain in flames from afar. A poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Cen Shen says: "I've just seen the Fire Mountain, rising abruptly east of Puchang, its red flames burning the clouds and its sultry air suffusing the desert void..."

Shengjin Pass, the main peak of the Flaming Mountain, presents an ever-changing appearance with steep cliffs and rugged rocks. The Chinese mythological novel Pilgrimage to the West, the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang encountered numerous obstacles. On approaching the Flaming Mountain, he found it in flames fanned up by the Iron Fan Princess. Fortunately, Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, stole her magic fan and extinguished the flames so that the party was able to continue their journey westward. It is said that the stone on which Xuanzang mounted his horse and the stake at which he tethered his horse are still there on the mountain. In spite of its barren crest, springs gurgle in the gullies and valleys and mountain flowers flourish, making the land look like a paradise.

Aydingkol (moonlight) Lake in the center of the depression is 154.5 meters lower than the Yellow Sea. It is the second lowest point in the world, next only to the Dead Sea in Jordan. The basin of the plated-shaped lake contains large amount of black alkaline soil. Around the lake reeds, tamarisks, sacsaouls "plump girls", and other shrubs and weeds thrive in a spectrum of red, yellow, green and purple. The annual rainfall is 16 mm, while the evaporation rate reaches 3,000 mm. As a result, Aydingkol Lake, once deep and expansive, is shrinking and is now only a meter deep. However, on sunny morning or moonlit night, the lake still shimmers enchantingly.

Farming is a time-honored profession in Turpan, the famous "country of fruits" in China. As early as the 70 BC, large scale land reclamation was carried out. During the Wei and Jin and the Southern and Northern Dynasties, grapes were widely cultivated in Turpan which "overflows with wine". According to the History of the Tang Dynasty, "during the reign of emperor Taizong, Ye Hu presented to the court a 20-foot vine known as the 'Mare's Teat', with fair-sized purplish grapes." Ye Hu, in fact, was Yi Du Hu, king of Gaochang in Turpan. When people in the interior still knew nothing about cotton, the History of the Liang Dynasty mentioned "Bai Die" (Levant cotton) being grown in Turpan. The Turpan area made a name in the world with its specialties -- the seedless white grapes, the Donghu Hami melons and the long-staple cotton.

More than 100 varieties of grape including the emerald green, agate purple, pearl white and ebony black hang on trellises stretching for 30 li in the suburbs of Turpan . On the mountain slopes perch drying houses with openwork walls in which hang strings of grapes drying slowly in a natural process. The raisins, when they are ready, are freshly green and extremely sweet. The grape harvest season is also a season to harvest happiness and love. Grapes are presented among friends and relatives, and as tokens of love between the young people. People sing of grapes and paint grapes and hold parties in vineyards where Chinese and foreign tourists gather to savor the Xinjiang specialty. Turpan, the most important grape production center in China, accounts for over 90 percent of seedless grapes cultivated in China.

The material prosperity is the result of the Turpan people's efforts in transforming nature and building oases. Over the centuries, they have dug under the land to build the karezes to store up water for irrigation. The karezes represent a great invention by the Turpan people. They now number more than a thousand with a total length of three thousand kilometers, equaling the length of the Great Wall. During the past 30 years the Turpan people have undertaken large scale forestation, planting trees at the desert frontier and around their fields to break the wind and protect the crops. Forest scientists have set up a desert life experimental station and introduced sand-fixing plans to convert vast tracts of desert into oases. The cultivated acreage of Turpan has increased from 460,000 mu in 1950 to 800,000 mu. The ancient Turpan oases are pulsing with life.

The Turpan people have also developed a unique method of medical treatment - the sand therapy. In summer, colored parasols mushroom over the sand dunes. People bury their legs or waists in the scorching sand or lie on it with their ailing parts exposed for massage, heat or magnetic treatment. As they sweat, doctors and nurses make the rounds giving direction or passing fruits and food. Lumbago or sciatica sufferers often gets noted results after a period of sand treatment.  

The Grape Valley

Looking at the Flaming Mountains in the distance from the city of Turpan, one can see nothing but glowing, barren red sand. But the Grape Valley of the Flaming Mountains, 15 kilometers from the city center, is a world of unique beauty, presenting a striking contrast with the hot, dry and barren outside.

Cushioned by green grass and graced with green trees, the valley is a world of green with brooks, canals and sparkling springs. There is a poetic flavor to the idyllic beauty of the valley. Scattered everywhere in the valley are trees: mulberry, peach, apricot, apple, pomegranate, pear, fig, walnut, elm, poplar and willow; also watermelons and muskmelons, making the valley into a "garden of one hundred flowers" in spring and an "orchard of one hundred kinds of fruits" in summer. In the valley there is a reception center where dense grapevines interweave with each other and winding paths lead to secluded places with clusters of grapes within easy reach.

Eight kilometers long, half a kilometer wide and inhabited by about 6,000 people of the Uygur, Hui and Han nationalities, the Grape Valley has more than 400 hectares of cultivated land, 220 hectares of which is grape-growing area. Grapes growing in the valley are of several strains, including the seedless white, rose-pink, mare-teat, black, Kashihar, Bijiagan and Suosuo. There is a fruit winery producing several kinds of wines and canned grapes. 

Flaming Mountains

The Flaming Mountains, lying in the middle of the Turpan Depression and running from east to west, are one of the branch ranges of the Tianshan Mountains and were formed in the organic movements of the Himalayas fifty million years ago. The Flaming Mountains are so hot and so dry that " flying birds even 500 kilometers away dare not to come". Yet, the mountains at the same time act like a giant natural dam of the underground reservoir in the basin.

In millions of years, the natural weathering and the numerous folded belts caused by the crystal movements have formed the undulating lie and the crisscross gullies and ravines of the Flaming Mountains. Under the blazing sun, the red rock glows and hot air curls up like smoke as though it were on fire, hence its name. The mountains are 98 kilometers long and 9 kilometers wide. The highest peak is 40 kilometers east of the city of Turpan and 831.7 meters above sea level.

Situated on the north route of the ancient Silk Road, the Flaming Mountains have many cultural relics and often told ancient tales. In recent years, the number of visitors to the mountains has been on the increase and clamoring to go on the Flaming Mountains tour has arisen.                                                                           

The Ancient City of Gaochang

The ancient city of Gaochang is located near the seat of the "Flaming Mountains" Township, 46 kilometers southeast of the city of Turpan. The city walls are high and the crisscrossing streets and the city moat are still visible. The city walls, which are basically intact, divide the city into three parts: the inner city, the outer city and the palace city. The 5.4 kilometer-long wall of the square outer city is 11.5 meters high and 12 meters thick. The wall is built of tamped earth, with some section repaired with adobe. There are two gates on each side of the outer city and the two on the west side with defense enclosures outside the gates are the best preserved.

The construction of the city of Gaochang started in the first century B.C. First called Gaochangbi, it was a key point on the ancient Silk Road, but after many changes in fortune over a period of 1,300 years, and under the jurisdictions of the Gaochang Prefecture, the Gaochang Kingdom and Huozhou Prefecture, the city was burnt down in wars in the fourteenth century.       

The inner city, which is located in the center of the outer city, has a 3-kilometer long wall, most of the west and the east sections of which are well preserved. The rectangular palace city is in the northern part of the city of Gaochang and it shares the north wall with the outer city and uses the north wall of the inner city as its south wall. There are still several 3 to 4 meters high earthen platforms in the palace city where the court of Huigu Gaochang Kingdom was seated.

In the north central part of the inner city, there is a high terrace on which stands a square pagoda built of adobe called "Khan's castle" which means "Imperial Palace". Somewhat to its west there is a half-underground, two-story structure which was probably the ruins of a palace.

In the southwestern part of the outer city there is a temple which is 130 meters long from east to west, 85 meters wide from south to north and covers an area of 10,000 square meters. The temple consists of an arched gate, courtyard, a lecture hall, a library of sutras, a main hall and the monks' dormitory. Murals remaining in the main hall are still visible. The renowned Buddhist monk Xuanzang of the Tang Dynasty is said to have lectured in the temple for more than one month in the year 628 on his way to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures. In the vicinity of the temple there are also ruins of workshops and market sites. In the southeastern part of the outer city there is a smaller temple, the ruins of the murals within which are better than those in the main hall.                    

The Bizaklik Thousand-Buddha Caves

The Bizaklik Thousand-Buddha Caves, 48 kilometers northeast of the Turpan urban area, are located in the Flaming Mountains' Mutou Valley. They were called the Ningrong Grottoes in the Tang Dynasty. There are 77 numbered grottoes, about 40 of which still have murals in them. The group of grottoes in Bizaklik, with a total of 1,200 square meters of murals, has the most grottoes, most diversified architectural styles and the richest mural content in the Turpan  area. The oldest grottoes were hewn in the period of Qushi Gaochang from the Tang Dynasty right up to the Yuan Dynasty in the thirteenth century. It was an important Buddhist gathering place. Its most prosperous period was under the reign of the Xizhou Huigu government, which was built the royal temple of the King of Huigu on this site. Most of the existing grottoes were extended or reconstructed during the Huigu period.

Even today, one can still see on the remaining Buddhist murals the features of the King and Queen of Huigu and people of different status, as well as scenes of the lives of ancient Uygur people. Inscriptions in the ancient Huigu, Chinese and Brahmi languages are valuable materials for research on the written languages and history of Xinjiang's various nationalities, and Uygur in particular.

The murals depicting "Buddhist disciples wailing in mourning" and "Bhikku wailing in mourning" on the back wall of the Grotto No.33 are rare artistic pieces which depict the inner feelings of the figures with vivid images and individual characteristics. The ancient instruments shown in the mural depicting "Female Dancers on Performance" in Grotto No.16 and the mural of "Transformation in the Hell" in Grotto No.17 are seldom seen in Buddhist grottoes in China.

Astana-Karakhoja Ancient Tombs

Known as the "Underground Museum" and widely valued by Chinese and foreign archaeologists and historians, this group of ancient tombs is 40 kilometers southeast of Turpan city proper and 6 kilometers from the ancient city of Gaochang. Astana means "capital" in Uygur and Karakhoja is the name of a legendary hero of the ancient Uygur Kingdom who removed the evils from the people by killing a vicious dragon. They are now the names of two local villages.

Buried in these tombs are nobles, officials and others from the period beginning in the Western Jin and ending in the middle of the Tang Dynasty. Curiously, the tomb of King Gaochang is found nowhere in the group of tombs, but the renowned general Zhang Xiong of the Qushi Gaochang Kingdom was buried here with his wife and son Zhang Huaiji. Almost all of the corpses in the more than 500 tombs have not rotted; instead they have become dried-up bodies, a phenomenon more unusual than the mummies found in the pyramids of Egypt. Most of the dried-up bodies are complete and intact. Thanks to the dry and hot climate, many paintings, earthen figurines and thousands of other unearthed cultural relics are well-preserved and as colorful as new ones. The unearthed boiled dumplings of the Tang Dynasty are the same shape as those of today and the stuffing of the dumplings is still fresh. Furthermore, on a bail of horse fodder are written the words "Judge Cen" and "Minister Feng". Judge Cen is the famous frontier poet Cen Shen of the Tang Dynasty and Minister Feng is Feng Changqing, the governor of Beiting Prefecture of the Tang Dynasty. Most of those buried here were people of the Han nationality, but also some minority nationalities, such as the Cheshi, Hun, Di, Xianbei, Gaoche, and Zhaowujiuxing.

Now three tombs have been opened to visitors. Besides dried-up corpses, there are murals depicting figures, birds and flowers on display in the three tombs.         

The Karez System

The Karez System, an irrigation system of wells connected by underground channels, is considered as one of the three great ancient projects in China, the other two being the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. There are in the Turpan area nearly one thousand Karez totaling 5,000 kilometers in length.

The structure of the Karez basically consists of wells, underground channels, ground canals and small reservoirs. In spring and summer, a great mount of melting snow and rainfall flow down from the Bogda and Karawuquntag mountains north and west of the Turpan Depression into the valleys and then seep into the Gobi Desert. Taking advantage of the mountain slopes, the working people ingeniously created the Karez to draw the underground water to irrigate the farmland. The water in Karez will not evaporate in large quantities even under the scorching heat and fierce wind, hence ensuring a stable water flow and gravity irrigation.

As far back as the Han Dynasty, the Karez was recorded in Shi Ji (The Historical Records) and then called "Well Canals". Most of the existing Karezes in the Turpan area were built in the Qing Dynasty and in after years. Nowadays, large stretches of fertile land are still irrigated by Karezes. The Wudaolin Karez and the Karez in the Wuxing Town are open to visitors.