Most planned towns are grids. Tekes, in the middle of the Ili valley, is a diagram: a central circle, eight avenues radiating from it like spokes, and ring roads connecting them in widening octagons — the whole town drawn as a bagua, the eight-trigram cosmological figure. It is the only city in China built at this scale to the design, and it is a genuinely interesting place to spend a morning.
The plan on the ground.
From the centre, the logic is disorienting in the best way: every intersection is an eight-way choice, and the rings mean you can walk any direction and arrive somewhere sensible. The centre circle holds the town's park and viewing tower; the inner ring holds the shops and the food streets; the outer rings are residential, quieter with each ring. Walking it feels like being inside a compass rose, and after two days residents navigate it with a fluency that visitors can only envy.
The cosmology in the plan.
The eight trigrams of the bagua map directions, seasons, elements and family relationships in a system of correspondences older than the town by millennia. Tekes was laid out in the 1930s by an administrator who took the figure seriously as civic geometry — an eightfold balanced plan, aligned to the cardinal points, with the centre as the still point. Whatever one thinks of the cosmology, the practical result is real: the town has no traffic lights worth mentioning, an extraordinary supply of corner shops, and a plan legible from a hillside.
Life in the rings.
The town of forty-odd thousand is a working Ili valley county seat, not a monument: horse carts share the outer avenues, the night market runs off the second ring, and the orchard lanes begin where the octagon ends. The visitor industry is proportionate — a few guesthouses, the tower, the noodles. What makes a stop memorable is the ordinariness happening inside the extraordinary plan: children cycling the spokes, corn drying on every flat roof, the eight avenues each wearing a different hour of the day.
Getting the view from above.
The plan reveals itself from above. The central tower gives a good sense of the spokes; the fuller view — all eight rings — comes from the viewpoints marked on the ridge east of town, which our routes pass in the late afternoon when the avenues cast long shadows and the diagram stands out of the farmland like an inlaid figure. It is the single most surprising photograph on the Ili journey.
Where it sits in a journey.
Tekes sits between the valley's riding country and the Kalajun grassland trailheads, so our Ili routes fold it in naturally — lunch in the rings, the tower, and on toward the passes. The cycling week passes through on its Zhaosu day. It is never the headline of a journey; it is the town you did not expect, and on the feedback forms it keeps beating places with three times its fame.
Where this leads
Lavender roads of the Ili valley
The Ili valley cycling week
Guide: Yining & the Ili valley