First-time visitors to Turpan keep asking about the towers. They stand in every village of the basin — square, mud-brick, three or four storeys, with walls that look half-built: rows of brick separated by open air, like lattices, like something forgotten. They are neither forgotten nor unfinished. They are the grape-drying houses, and they are the most elegant piece of food technology on the whole plate.
The towers on the skyline.
The design is a response to the climate, and it reads plainly once seen. Turpan's summer heat is ferocious — the basin is the hottest place in China — but the air is parched dry, and dry heat plus airflow is precisely the recipe for drying fruit without cooking it. The slatted walls let the desert wind pass straight through the building; the interior galleries hold the grape trays in the draft and the shade; nothing mechanical is involved at any stage.
How the machine works.
A harvest evening, mid-August: the bunches come in from the trellises at the peak of ripeness and are laid, one layer deep, on timber trays inside the towers. Then the basin does the work. The hot wind moves through the slats day and night; over roughly forty days the grapes dimple, darken and concentrate into raisins — the green seedless ones that appear, unnamed and uncelebrated, in bakeries all over China. No added sugar is possible; the fruit is its own syrup.
The heat that pays for it.
The towers are why the basin's ferocious summer is an asset rather than a sentence. The same heat that empties the streets at noon in July — 45 degrees is a normal reading, and the ground nearby, the famous sand-hill cure station, runs hotter still — is the engine of the valley's economy. Turpan's growers have arranged their year around it: vines in the sheltered trellis lanes, harvest at the height of the heat, drying through the wind of late summer, and the whole human calendar bent to avoid the hours the towers work best.
The valley itself.
The Grape Valley, a green incision in the red hills eight kilometres from the city, is where the trellis lanes are oldest and most continuous. Walking them in August is a specific pleasure: shade everywhere, bunches hanging overhead, channels of karez water running beside the paths. It is also where the towers stand thickest — the villages inside the valley dry their crop where it is picked, and the skyline of slatted brick is continuous.
Seeing them properly.
The towers photograph best in the low light when the sun comes through the slats, which is one more reason our oasis walk starts days early in this basin: Jiaohe at dawn, the trellis lanes in the late afternoon, a village drying-house visited with its keeper when the trays are going in. Late summer sees the work; spring sees the towers empty; both are honest. But if you can choose, choose August — the machine, running, is worth the heat.
Where this leads
The karez: water in the desert
The oasis kitchens
The Turpan oasis walk