Taklamakan Desert
A vast cold sand sea in western China, ringed by mountains and crossed by the Silk Road
The Taklamakan fills the great Tarim Basin of far western China, a sand sea of some 337,000 square kilometres hemmed in by mountains on nearly every side. It is one of the largest sandy deserts on Earth and among the most forbidding, a place where dunes can climb to 300 metres and shift across the basin in the wind. Its reputation is captured in the name often translated, perhaps too neatly, as the place from which there is no return, a warning earned by the caravans and explorers who vanished in its sands.
Walled off by the Tian Shan to the north and the Kunlun and Pamir ranges to the south and west, the Taklamakan lies deep in the continental interior, far from any ocean, which makes it both intensely arid and, in winter, bitterly cold. Sandstorms can darken the sky for days. Rivers fed by mountain snowmelt, chiefly the Tarim, fringe the desert and once nourished oases and the now-vanished lake of Lop Nur. Beneath and around the dunes lie major reserves of oil and natural gas, drawing modern roads straight across the sands.
For more than two thousand years the Taklamakan's rim was threaded by the Silk Road, whose oasis towns, Kashgar, Khotan, and Kucha, grew rich relaying goods and ideas between China, India, and the Mediterranean. Buddhism travelled these routes into China, leaving cave temples and ruined cities later buried by sand. The desert's dryness preserved astonishing relics, including the Tarim mummies, naturally desiccated people with strikingly Western features who lived here thousands of years ago.