Turpan / 吐鲁番

We have three shorter breaks in the spring: Tomb-Sweeping Day in April, May 1, and Dragonboat Festival in June.  The long weekend isn't enough time to go too far away, but it is a good opportunity to see more of Xinjiang. 

During the Tomb-Sweeping Day holiday, I headed southeast to Turpan, an oasis town in the desert, near one of the lowest points in China and the world.  I spent 3 days riding a bike around town and to nearby sights, including 700 year old underwater irrigation canals constructed and still used by the local Turkic population, the remains of an ancient city from the Han dynasty, , the "Flaming Mountains," and some caves containing ancient, mostly defaced Buddhist art.

Here is a model of an underground irrigation canal, or karez in Uighur (坎儿井).   They span for miles into the desert, using gravity to bring water down from the Tian Shan mountains into the Turpan depression.  The Turpan area has several thousand miles of karez channels, built hundreds of years ago by digging wells deep into the earth so that workers could be lowered underground using a hand- or animal-powered wench to dig out the channel. It was really cool to see the water running through the karez that I visited.

The next day I pedaled out of Turpan city to the Jiaohe Ruins.  Jiaohe was a capital city of the local kingdom from 108 BC to 450 AD, the westernmost Chinese military post during the mid-600s, and an important Silk Road stop.  However, it was abandoned after the Mongol invasion in the 1200s, and not unearthed until the 1950s.

 Turpan is a major grape-growing region, so as I was biking I passed a lot of grape vines and mud-brick structures used for drying raisins and other fruits (visible behind the vines in the picture below).  These low rectangular structures, which are built with the bricks staggered so that there are many holes in the walls, are unique to the Turpan area, it seems.

During my last day in Turpan, I headed east on the national highway that leads out of Xinjiang.  As I was biking, I met a Chinese girl and a Taiwanese Brazilian who were also crazy enough to do the 40km ride to the Flaming Mountains.  These mountains, which are famous in China because they were supposedly created by the Monkey King according to the Journey to the West, get really hot in the summertime and are supposed to look like they are on fire, but we didn't get the effect at this time of year.  Unimpressed, we continued on to the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves.

Most of the caves date back to between 900-1300 AD. Unfortunately only a few of them were open for viewing, and the Buddhist images were hard to see, as some of them had been stripped off the walls by a German explorer, and others had been damaged by local Muslims, who seemed to have particularly concentrated on gouging out the eyes and faces of the Buddhas. 

Turpan was an interesting place to visit for historical reasons, but I was somewhat underwhelmed by everything except the Jiaohe Ruins. However, for the next break (this past weekend), I went to an overwhelmingly beautiful place in northwest Xinjiang near Kazakhstan, so expect a new post soon!