Turpan & the east.

The oasis that shouldn't exist.

Turpan should be uninhabitable. The depression floor sits 154 metres below sea level, rainfall is measured in millimetres, and summer heat passes 45 °C. It is instead the greenest oasis in the region — because two thousand years ago its engineers stopped fighting the desert and went under it: the karez, gravity-fed underground channels that carry Tianshan snowmelt for tens of kilometres without losing a drop to the sun. A thousand wells still work; the vineyards they feed produce the sweetest grapes in China.

The east is where the silk road's archive lies open. Jiaohe, an entire city carved downward into a plateau, abandoned and left standing. Gaochang, the mud-walled caravan capital the monk Xuanzang reached in the 630s. Bezeklik's painted caves above the Flaming mountains, with the scars of the 1905-13 expeditions still visible where the murals were sawn out. And the living archive: Tuyoq village under the red wall, grape trellises over the lanes, bread ovens in the mornings.

It is also the easiest Xinjiang there is — no altitude, no camping, short distances, five comfortable nights, and a climate that turns walkable exactly when the mountains are snowbound. Most of our travellers meet the east first, or last, as the accessible bookend of a bigger journey.