A Minaret & the Karez Wells
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 visiting America. She wanted to see the West-the Wild West of cowboys that she knew from the movies-and she wanted to listen to jazz in a jazz bar. So pervasive are these media images of America that they penetrate even the remotest oasis on the Silk Road, shaping the images of a generation.
Emin Minaret, a mile east of the city, the prettiest tower on the Silk Road, also called Sugong Tower, the minaret was built of blue brick and completed in 1778. The bricks of the circular, smoothly tapered tower are laid in various patterns: waves, pyramids, and flower petals. The architect was a Uighur named Ibrahim. Attached to the 43m (144-ft.) minaret is a white stone mosque, the largest in the region. Its interior is plain. The roof is of woven mats. The floor is covered in prayer rugs. The Iman’s seat is a humble, straw-woven chair.
The Emin Minaret is surrounded by grape arbors. Grape vines came into China on the Silk Road 2,000 years ago, and residents of Turpan planted them immediately. At the western base of the Flaming Mountains, there’s an entire valley called Grape Gorge (Putao Gou), a park or vineyards and fruit groves with trellised walkways and courtyard picnic tables. The grapes are dried in hundreds of ingenious outbuildings ventilated by the open brickwork of their walls, creating the sweet raisins for which Turpan is renowned.
The sine qua non for grapes-for all of life along the Silk Road-is water. Turpan’s source is locked up in the snows and glaciers of the Heavenly Mountains to the south. For the last 20 centuries, the mountain waters have reached Turpan through a massive undergronf network of tunnels, an irrigation system known as the karez. Karez wells (kan’er jing) are dug to tap the subterranean streams that originate at the foot of the mountain. Tunnels are hollowed out and elevated so that gravity pushes the well water across the desert to the canals of Turpan. More than 1,610 km (1,000 miles) of tunnels have been dug under the desert floor at Turpan, some stretching as far as 40km (25 miles). The karez system suffers from continual clogging. To maintain it, a man must frequently be slowed down a shaft into a tunnel. By the use of pulleys, his horse hauls up buckets of mud tethered to a rope until the passage is clear.
One karez well site has opened at an exhibition center in Turpan, complete with a museum offering displays and pictures. Visitors descend into several hand-dug tunnels for a look at the irrigating waters. The tunnels are spacious enough to stand up in, and they are cool, the coolest spots in town. Working in them must be like digging in a mine. The local people regard the karez wells as one of China’s three greatest ancient works, the other two being the Great Wall and the Grand Canal.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Heavenly Lake (Tian Chi)
- Southern Pastures
- The Road to Urumqi
- Urumqi: The Lake of Heaven
- Ancient Cities
