Everything about The Taklamakan Desert totally explained
The
Taklamakan Desert (Takelamagan Shamo, 塔克拉玛干沙漠), also known as Taklimakan, is a
desert in
Central Asia, in the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the
People's Republic of China. It is bounded by
Kunlun Mountains to the south, and
Pamir Mountains and
Tian Shan (ancient
Mount Imeon) to the west and north.
Taklamakan is known as one of the largest sandy deserts in the world, ranking 15th in size in a ranking of the world's largest non-polar deserts.
It covers an area of 270,000
km² of the
Tarim Basin, 1,000 km long and 400 km wide. It is crossed at its northern and at its southern edge by two branches of the
Silk Road as travellers sought to avoid the arid wasteland.
In recent years, the People's Republic of China has constructed a
cross-desert highway that links the cities of
Hotan (on the southern edge) and
Luntai (on the northern edge).
Climate
Taklamakan is the paradigm of a
cold desert. Given its relative proximity with the cold to frigid
air masses in
Siberia, extreme lows are recorded in wintertime, sometimes well below . During the
2008 Chinese winter storms episode the Taklamakan was reported to be for the first time covered in its entirety of a thin layer of snow reaching in some observatories.
Its extreme inland position, virtually in the very heartland of Asia and thousands of kilometres from any open body of water, accounts for the cold character of its nights even during summertime.
Oasis
There is no water on the desert and it's hazardous to cross.
Takla Makan means "go in and you'll never come out" Merchant caravans on the
Silk Road would stop for relief at the thriving
oasis towns.
The key oasis towns, watered by rainfall from the mountains, were
Kashgar,
Marin,
Niya,
Yarkand, and
Khotan (Hetian) to the south,
Kuqa and
Turfan in the north, and
Loulan and
Dunhuang in the east.
The archeological treasures found in its sand buried ruins point to
Tocharian, early
Hellenistic,
Indian and
Buddhistic influences.
Mummies, some 4000 years old, have been found in the region. They show the wide range of peoples who have passed through. Some of the mummies appear European.
Later, the Taklamakan was inhabited by
Turkic peoples. Starting with the
Tang Dynasty, the
Chinese periodically extended their control to the oasis cities of the Taklamakan in order to control the important
silk route trade across Central Asia. Periods of Chinese rule were interspersed with rule by Turkic and
Mongol and
Tibetan peoples. The present population consists largely of Turkic,
Uyghur people.
Further Information
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