Turpan — a historian’s guide
Notes on the desert oasis and its ruined cities
Turpan sits in a furnace. It is a Uyghur oasis on the northern arm of the Silk Road, where the road skirting the top of the Taklamakan desert ran along the foot of the Tian Shan, watered by snowmelt and dotted with caravan towns. What sets Turpan apart is the ground beneath it: the Turpan Depression, a basin sunk well below sea level, among the hottest and lowest places in China. The floor of the basin holds Aydingkol Lake (Moon Lake), a dried salt pan whose bed lies around 154 metres below sea level — the lowest land in China, and by most reckonings the second- or third-lowest point on the Earth’s land surface after the shores of the Dead Sea. None of this should support agriculture, yet Turpan grows some of the best grapes and raisins in Asia, fed for centuries by an ingenious system of underground channels called karez. It is a place where geography did its worst and human engineering answered back.
Setting
The Turpan Depression is a rain-shadow trap. The Tian Shan to the north wring the moisture out of incoming weather, leaving the basin floor baking under summer temperatures that routinely top 40°C and have given the surrounding red ridges their name, the Flaming Mountains. Rainfall is negligible; evaporation is brutal. The basin’s saving grace is altitude in reverse — it sits so low that gravity does the irrigating. Snowmelt from the Tian Shan sinks into the gravel apron at the mountains’ base, and the karez tap that groundwater and lead it downhill through tunnels to the oasis, losing little to the sun on the way. Without that meltwater and those tunnels there is no Turpan, only salt and stone. The combination — extreme heat, long growing season, reliable underground water — is what produces the famous sugar-heavy grapes.
A kingdom carved between empires
Turpan’s recorded history begins with the Jushi (Cheshi) kingdom, the local power whose people built the first cities here in the centuries before the Common Era. The oasis became a prize in the long contest between the Han Chinese state and the steppe confederations to its north, changing hands repeatedly. The Han garrisoned it; later the Tang absorbed it outright, establishing the prefecture of Xizhou in the seventh century and, for a time, basing the Protector General of the Western Regions here — the senior Chinese military command in the far west.
Around this Tang core grew the Kingdom of Gaochang (Karakhoja), a settled Buddhist state with deep Chinese and Tocharian colouring. In 843, refugees from the collapsing Uyghur Khaganate on the Mongolian steppe migrated south and founded a new Uyghur kingdom centred on Gaochang, known by the title its rulers took, Idiqut (“lord of fortune”). These Buddhist Uyghur kings wintered at Gaochang and summered in the cooler hills, sponsored the painting of the Bezeklik caves, and held the oasis as a cultured crossroads until it fell under Kara-Khitan and then Mongol suzerainty — the Idiqut Barchuq submitted to Genghis Khan around 1209–11.
The religious record is layered like the ruins. Buddhism dominated for centuries, but Turpan was also a stronghold of Manichaeism (the Uyghur khaghans had adopted it on the steppe) and home to Nestorian Christian communities — three faiths sharing one oasis, their texts later recovered from the dry tombs and caves. Islam arrived comparatively late, becoming the settled faith of the region roughly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the Uyghurs of Turpan are Muslim today.
Sites
A note on priorities: Jiaohe and Gaochang are the heart of any historical visit, the Astana tombs and Bezeklik reward those who care about what made these cities tick, and Grape Valley and the Flaming Mountains are scenery you can take or leave.
Jiaohe Ruins (Yarkhoto) — The one unmissable site. Jiaohe is a city carved down out of a leaf-shaped loess plateau that stands some 30 metres above two converging river channels, which gave it sheer cliffs on every side. Because the ravines were defence enough, the city was never given walls; instead the builders cut streets, houses and temples downward into the earth itself. Founded by the Jushi as a garrison and later a Tang administrative seat, it was inhabited for around 1,600 years. It is one of the best-preserved ancient earthen cities anywhere, and walking its sunken lanes at the end of the day, with the loess glowing, is the finest hour Turpan offers.
Gaochang Ruins (Karakhoja) — The larger ruined capital, sprawling near the foot of the Flaming Mountains. This was the seat of the Buddhist Uyghur Idiqut kingdom. It is less intact than Jiaohe — sun-dried walls eroded into mounds over the centuries, with the outline of the city, a monastery and palace area still legible. Worth it for the scale and the history, though you do more imagining here than at Jiaohe.
Astana Tombs — The cemetery of Gaochang, and a scholar’s treasure house. The desert dryness preserved bodies, silk, food, painted figurines and, above all, paper: contracts, official documents, letters and accounts that have told us more about ordinary Silk Road life than almost any other source. Only a few tombs are open, but the principle — that the rubbish and paperwork of a vanished town survived because it never rained — is the point.
Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves — Buddhist and Manichaean cave murals cut into a gorge wall above a river, painted under the Uyghur kings. The site is famous now partly for what is missing. Between 1902 and 1914 the German expeditions led by Albert von Le Coq sawed many of the finest murals off the walls and shipped them to Berlin. Larger panels, fixed into the Ethnological Museum, could not be moved when war came and were destroyed in the Allied bombing of Berlin during the Second World War. What you see in the gorge is therefore a stripped, scarred shell; the masterpieces survive mainly as photographs. A cautionary monument to the age of archaeological plunder.
Karez Irrigation System — The engineering that makes the oasis possible: vertical wells linked by gently sloping underground tunnels that lead Tian Shan groundwater to the fields by gravity alone, with little evaporation. The technology is closely related to the Persian qanat, the same idea carried east along the trade routes. A museum in town lets you walk a section of tunnel and see how the wells march in lines across the gravel.
Emin Minaret (Sugong Ta) — Built in 1777 under the Qianlong emperor to honour the Turpan general Emin Khoja and paid for by his son Suleman, this is the largest old mosque tower in Xinjiang. It is a tapering 44-metre cone of sun-dried brick laid in fifteen geometric patterns — waves, flowers, lozenges — handsome in its plainness and a clean marker of the Islamic chapter of the oasis.
Flaming Mountains — The red sandstone ridges that radiate heat across the basin, immortalised as an obstacle in the Ming novel Journey to the West. Mostly a photo stop; the colour at the right hour is the reward.
Grape Valley — Touristy and packaged, but the vineyards and the latticed brick raisin-drying houses are working agriculture, not stage scenery. Go for the shade, the fruit and a sense of what all that karez water is for.
The town today
Modern Turpan is a Uyghur-majority oasis town of a few hundred thousand people, still defined by its grapes, raisins and melons and by the long summer heat. Vine trellises shade the older streets; the market trades in dried fruit. It is a quiet, low-rise place by Chinese standards, more agricultural oasis than city, and it makes a calm base for the ruins scattered around the basin.
Reading
- Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History — builds much of its argument on the Turfan and Astana documents; the best single starting point for what the oasis reveals.
- Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road — the gripping account of the explorer-archaeologists, von Le Coq and Bezeklik included.
- Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road — reconstructs the road through individual lives, several rooted in this corner of the route.
Why it matters
Turpan is the Silk Road with the roof off. Because it almost never rains, the basin kept what other places lost — the paperwork of a Buddhist Uyghur kingdom, the bodies in its tombs, the murals in its caves, the cities cut from its own earth. Here you can read, in surviving documents and standing ruins, how a string of faiths and empires passed through one improbable oasis below sea level, and how a few clever tunnels turned a furnace into a garden. Few places let you stand so close to the texture of the medieval trade routes.