Word: taklamakan
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...Silk road gem and jade shop," the sign proudly states. Centrally located just down the street from the main mosque in Khotan, a dusty oasis town located in the vast Taklamakan Desert in China's far southwest, the shop is a focal point for the Muslim Uighurs who make up the majority of the local population. But though it is mid-morning, its gates are secured with heavy steel padlocks. Warning notices from the Public Security Bureau are pasted across the doors announcing that the business has been closed indefinitely. Until last month, this was one of the biggest private...
...fields under the East China Sea. And no foreign companies have been willing to participate in drilling in the Tarim Basin, considered China's last onshore region with major untapped reserves. The oil is thought to be of low quality, and moving it out of the isolated Taklamakan desert is just too expensive. "China's state-run companies sometimes operate for the national interest," says a Beijing-based executive of a foreign oil company. "But we have to base our decisions on profitability...
MARKET DAYS A bone-jarring two-day jeep ride across Kyrgyzstan's border with China lies Kashgar, a hub on the Silk Road for more than a millennium. Camel trains laden with tea and textiles would emerge from the Taklamakan Desert, meeting other traders descending from the lofty Pamir Mountains, all survivors of terrible deprivation and brigandage. The glory days might be long gone but so are the bandits, and Kashgar welcomes ordinary tourists eager to see Central Asia's most spectacular market...
...region is probably a more volatile confrontation point than even the far-eastern Ussuri River area, where Chinese and Soviet troops engaged in a series of bloody border fights last March. The Dzungarian Gates lie just 250 miles from China's nuclear-testing and research sites on the Taklamakan Desert. Moreover, the Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region, as it is officially called, is two-thirds populated by Kazakh peoples, many of whom resent Chinese rule Russian radio propaganda beamed there frequently urges Chinese Kazakhs to rise up in arms against the Peking authorities...
South of the Tien Shan on the Chinese side lies the Taklamakan Desert and the lake of Lop Nor, home of the Chinese nuclear tests. Beginning about 1960, the Peking government set out to transform the desert into a fertile area. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, party cadres, middle-school graduates and intellectuals thought to be in need of "reeducation" have been sent to Sinkiang to work for the cause, and their efforts have had some results. But for the most part, Sinkiang remains a wasteland, even less developed than the Soviet lands to the north...