Beijing Travel

According to one legend, 3,000 years ago, the Han Wudi Emperor was invited by Xi Wang Mu, the immortal Queen Mother of the West, to a banquet at Heavenly Lake. The peach tree of immortality was served. The emperor saved the pits to plant, but XiWang Mu told him the soil of China could not sustain them, that... ;

Every spring and summer, the Kazakhs ride into the White Poplar Valley and up into the Southern Mountains (Nan Shan), an extension of the Heavenly Mountains. They pack up their families and their tents, called yurts, and make the move on horseback. The attraction is the pastures, where they graze their sheep... ;

Downtown Urumqi’s avenues are tree-lined. Modern construction is underway everywhere. There also are Russian-style buildings Left over from the 1950s, their iron roofs painted green and their bright porticoes giving the gray cityscape a splash of color. There are over a hundred mosques, many of them... ;

No it in the world is more distant from the sea than Urumqi, which lies 2,249km (1,397 miles) away from the nearest ocean. The city’s name means “beautiful pastures” in Mongolian, but Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, is a modern industrial... ;

Turpan is roughly 75% Uighur. Christina, my guide, is a local Han Chinese, meaning she probably went to a Chinese school and was not taught the Unighur language, Uighur attend their own schools, in which Chinese is studied as a second language. Each side coexists sweetly, it seems. Christina had a dream of... ;

South of the Thousand Buddha Caves (about 40km/25 miles southeast of Turpan) are the ruins of Gaochang (Kharakhoja), an ancient desert capital founded in the 2nd century B.C. as a garrison on the Silk Road. It served as the capital of Xinjiang (the Western Territories) during the Tang Dynasty, starting in... ;

The Flaming Mountains (Huoyan Shin) line the northern rim of the Turpan Depression. Consisting of barren red limestone, the 100km (60-miles) long bluff resembles a tableau of fiery tongues when ignited by the afternoon sun. It is a sight familiar to Chinese readers of the novel Journey to the West, an... ;

The first thing that strikes out standers traveling west from Gansu Province into Xinjiang Province is that you are no longer quite in China. This vast northwestern region-China’s Alaska-is divided into northern grasslands and southern deserts by the Heavenly Mountains (Tian Shan). The dramatic, arid... ;

The Mogao caves, 24km (15 miles) southwest of Dunhuang, all the carves are numbered, although not in any discernible order. The oldest are in the central portion of the mile-long cliff. Four tiers of cement walkways with railings, replacing the wooden ladders and catwalks in the 1950s, connect the... ;

China’s richest treasure house of Buddhist paintings, statues, and manuscripts lies 26km (16 miles) southeast of Dunhuang in the Mogao caves. These magnificent caves were created over a thousand-year period stretching from the 4th century to the 14th century A.D. Nine dynasties rose and fell during... ;