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Ulink Travel Center
Home> China City Guide> Turpan
Providing detailed travelling knowledge about Turpan, the Land of Fruit and Melon or the Fireland, and tourist attractions in Turpan.
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 specialities -- 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 afforestation, 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.
With the implementation of the policy of enlivening the economy and opening to the outside world, Turpan has seen a rapid growth in tourism. Tourist facilities have been improved greatly, and personnel trained. It is attracting visitors from all over the world.
Turpan is to become more charming in the century to come.
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.
In millions of years, the natural weathering and the numerous folded belts caused by the crustal 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.
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.
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.
Aydingkol Lake, 40 kilometers south of the city of Turpan, is the "Bottom of the Depression". The lake, 40 kilometers in length, 8 kilometers in breadth and 152 square kilometers in size, is 154.33 meters below the Yellow Sea level, the second inland depression next only to the Dead Sea (-391 meters) in the world.
Millions of years ago, Aydingkol Lake was a freshwater lake one thousand times the size of the present one. But, except for a sheet of very shallow water in its southwest part, today's Aydingkol Lake is covered only by silvery white salt crystals and salt crusts shimmering on the dried-up lake bottom. For this reason, the local Uygur people call it "Moonlight Lake". People are easily misled by the false appearances of the mirages and the "dry" surface of the lake and often get bogged down. Here one can not find fish in water or birds in the sky, only a hare or a field-mouse scurrying away. Attracted by its peculiar geographical characteristics and wilderness, a continuous stream of visitors from all over China and abroad come to the lake to sightsee, take pictures and explore.
Aydingkol Lake is said to contain an amount of salt large enough to supply the one billion people of the country for a whole year. In addition, there are rich deposits of coal and oil under the lake. A chemical plant, the biggest enterprise in the Turpan area, has been set up by the lake side, which uses the crystal salt, vitriol and Glauber's salt as its raw materials and sells its products both at home and abroad.
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 defence enclosures outside the gates are the best preserved.
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 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.
It was classified as an important cultural unit protected by the state in 1961.
The Ancient City of Jiaohe is located in the Yarnaz Valley thirteen kilometers west of Turpan. It was first the capital of the State of South Cheshi, which was one of the thirty-six states in the Western Region. As described in the dynastic history book The Notes on the Western Region, A History of the Han Dynasty, "The State of South Cheshi made the city of Jiaohe its capital, which was circled by rivers flowing by the city, hence the name of 'Jiaohe' (the city of joining rivers)." Built on a loess plateau 30 meters high, the ancient city is 1,650 meters long and 300 meters wide. The city has no walls and is protected by the natural fortification of the precipitous cliffs.
During the Western Han Dynasty, the central government established "Jiaohebi" (an administrative division) and appointed and dispatched a commanding general officer to the Turpan area. During the period from the Northern Wei to the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, Jiaohebi was Jiaohe Prefecture under the jurisdiction of Gaochang Kingdom. The Anxi Military Viceroy's Office, the highest civil and military administrative organ set up by the Tang government in the Western Region, was first established in the city. Between the middle of the eighth century and the middle of the ninth century, the city was occupied by Tibetans. After that, it was called Jiaohe Prefecture and fell under the jurisdiction of the Huigu Gaochang Kingdom. At the end of the thirteenth century, it was destroyed in Mongolian aristocratic rebellions.
The size of the existing ruins indicates its great prosperity during the Tang Dynasty. There are two city gates. The main southern gate is in ruins. The eastern gate is relatively well-preserved, with visible gateways and mortise openings for mounting the gate lintels. There are hideouts built in the gate for soldiers to defend the city.
The ruins of the buildings, divided basically into temples, civilian dwellings and government offices, have an area of 220,000 square meters. Entering the southern gate, one can see a 10 meter-wide and 350-meter-long main street leading to the biggest Buddhist temple located in the north-central part of the city. The tower in front of the temple gate is still intact, and standing on top of the tower one can enjoy the panorama of the whole city. There are still some more temples in the city. In the southeastern area of the city are located administrative office buildings and official residences which are the only big buildings built of bricks and tiles. According to researchers, the magnificent, half-underground, two-story building is probably the seat of Anxi's Military Viceroy's Office during the Tang Dynasty.
The architectural style of the ancient city of Jiaohe differs from that of the city of Gaochang. Here in Jiaohe, courtyards are pits dug in the ground, dwellings are caves opened into the earth and walls are built of tamped earth. Houses are two-storied without windows and doors on the side facing streets and courtyard gates are hidden in deep lanes. The architectural style also features some typical elements of the Tang Dynasty. Visitors to the city can still walk along the streets and go through the halls into the charming inner rooms.
The ancient city of Jiaohe was classified as an important cultural unit protected by the state in 1961.
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.
The Bizaklik Thousand-Buddha Caves became an important cultural unit protected by the state in 1961.
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.
It was classified as an important cultural unit protected by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in 1957.
Emin Tower (The Tower for Showing Gratitude to Eminhoja) also called "Sugong Tower" and "The Turpan Tower" by the local Uygur people, is located 2 kilometers east of the city of Turpan. Built in 1778, it is the biggest tower in Xinjiang, and has an architectural style all its own.
In the shape of a cone and built of bricks arranged in fifteen patterns of rhombuses, ripples, varied four-petal flowers, and mountains, the tower is 37 meters high and 10 meters in diameter at the base. The tower has 14 windows opened in different directions and at different heights and a seventy-one-stepped spiral flight of stairs leading to the top.
At the entrance of the tower stands a stone tablet erected when the tower was built, on which is recorded, in Uygur and Chinese, the reasons for building the tower. It was built by Turpan prefecture commandant Su Laiman to commemorate and praise his father Eminhoja who achieved brilliant military success in suppressing the armed rebellion raised by the Jungar aristocrats.
Next to the tower is the biggest mosque in the Turpan area, and the two form an integral whole. The rectangular mosque has a hall in its middle and an arched gate with a pointed top. The hall can hold up to one thousand people attending service. During religious festivals, crowds of people stream into the mosque and make the mosque a hive of activity.
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 5000 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.
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.
8 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.
The center is sixteen kilometers northwest of the city. Every year from June to August, the two big sandhills are thickly dotted with colorful cloth sheds, parasols and tents. Under these sunshading facilities, people, lying or sitting, bury their bodies with hot sand, dripping with sweat. This is the well-known and peculiar "sand therapy of Turpan, the Flaming Prefecture". The sand therapy has at once the effects of heat therapy, magneto therapy and massage. According to scientific experiments, the effectiveness of the treatment for arthritis and rheumatism is above ninety percent.
The whitewashed building nearby is the Sand Therapy Center, consisting of treatment rooms, wards and a canteen, with medical workers for auxiliary medical treatment. Board and lodging are available in the center for patients.
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