Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region is one of the most exciting parts of China, an extraordinary terrain, more than 3000km from any coast, which despite all the historical upheavals since the collapse of the Silk Road trade, still comprises the same old oasis settlements strung out along the ancient routes many still producing the silk and cotton for which they were famed in Rom times . Geographically, Xinjiang- occupies an area slightly greater than Western Europe or Alaska, it covers over 1,600,000 square kilometers (617,763 square miles), one-sixth of China’s total territory and yet its population is just twenty million.

The land of Xinjiang is among the least hospitable in all China, covered for the most part by arid desert and mountain. Essentially, it can be thought of astwo giant basins, both surrounded on all sides by mountains. The range lying between the two basins is the Tian Shan (Heavenly Mountains), which effectively bisects Xinjiang from west to east. The basin to the north is known as the Junggar Basin, or Jungaria. The capital of Xinjiang, and only major city, Urumqi, is here, on the very southern edge of the basin, as is the heavily Kazakh town of Yining, right up against the border with Kazakhstan. The Junggar Basin has been subject to fairly substantial Han settlement over the past forty years, with a degree of industrial and agricultural development. It remains largely grassland, with large state farms in the centre and Kazakh and Mongol herdsmen (still partially nomadic) in the mountain pastures on the fringes. The climate is not particularly hot in summer, and virtually Siberian from October through to March. To the south is the Tarim Basin, dominated by the scorch- ing .Taklamakan Desert, where the weather is fiercely hot and dry in summer. This is where the bulk of the Uigur population lives, in strings of oases (Turpan and Kashgar among them) scattered along the old routes of the Silk Road. Some of these oasis cities are buried in the desert and long forgotten; others survive on irrigation using water from the various rivers and streams that flow from surrounding mountains. As well as forgotten cities, these sands also cover another buried treasure - oil are under the Taklamakan alone.