Taklamakan Desert

The Taklamakan Desert is a large desert in northwest China. It is found inside the Tarim Basin in Southern Xinjiang. This desert is surrounded by many tall mountain ranges. To the south are the Kunlun Mountains, to the west are the Pamir Mountains, to the north is the Tian Shan range, and to the east is the Gobi Desert.

The Taklamakan Desert is one of the driest places on Earth. Its name means “you go in, you don’t come out,” showing how hard it is to travel through. Over time, people have found clever ways to live and move through this tough land. The desert is important because it tells us about Earth’s natural history and how life can survive in very hard places.

Etymology

Most people think the word "makan" comes from the Persian language and means "place". But the meaning of "Takla" is not so clear. Some believe it comes from the Uyghur language, meaning "to leave alone" or "abandoned place". Others think it might mean "the place of ruins" in Turki. Chinese scholars Wang Guowei and Huang Wenbi thought it might be connected to the Tocharians, an ancient group from the same area.

In stories, people say the name means "Place of No Return", suggesting once you enter, you might never leave. The name was first written down in a book from 1867 in the Hotan area of Xinjiang.

Geography

The Taklamakan Desert covers an area of 337,000 km², which is slightly smaller than Germany. It is found in the Tarim Basin, a large area that stretches 1,000 kilometres long and 400 kilometres wide. Two branches of the old Silk Road pass by its edges, helping travelers avoid the harsh sands. The desert has very tall sand dunes, some reaching up to 300 feet high, and it experiences extreme temperatures with very hot summers and very cold winters. Sandstorms can be dangerous, and most people live only near places where water is available, called oases.

China has built roads and a railway across the desert to help people travel. The desert’s sand dunes keep moving, which can damage grasslands and homes. In 1978, China began a big project called the Green Great Wall to plant trees and stop the desert from growing. By 2024, this project had created a long green belt around the desert using special trees that can survive in sandy places. This helps reduce sandstorms and supports new energy projects like solar and wind power.

Climate

The Taklamakan Desert has a cold desert climate because it is protected from rain by the Himalayas. In winter, temperatures can drop below −20 °C (−4 °F), and in summer, they can rise to 40 °C (104 °F). During a big winter storm in 2008, the desert was covered in snow for the first time ever recorded, with temperatures as low as −26.1 °C (−15 °F).

The desert is very far from any large water, which helps create big changes in temperature between day and night. In spring, when the land gets warm quickly and there is very little plants, strong winds can pick up dust and create dust storms, especially in the southern part of the desert. Satellites have tracked this dust moving through the mountains. Over the past years, the amount of dust in the air has been slowly decreasing.

Oasis

The Taklamakan Desert has very little water, making it hard to travel through. Traders on the Silk Road would stop at the busy oasis towns for supplies. These towns were close to many ancient places—like the Amu Darya basin to the northwest, mountain passes leading to Iran and India to the southwest, and China to the east. Even to the north, there were old towns such as Almaty.

Important oasis towns included Kashgar, Miran, Niya, Yarkand, and Khotan in the south, Kuqa and Turpan in the north, and Loulan and Dunhuang in the east. Today, some of these places, like Miran and Gaochang, are ruins and have very few people living there in the modern Xinjiang region of the People's Republic of China.

Archaeologists have found many treasures buried in the sand of the Taklamakan Desert. These treasures show influences from Tocharian, early Hellenistic, Indian, and Buddhist cultures. Famous explorers like Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq, and Paul Pelliot wrote about the region's treasures and dangers. Some very old mummies, dating back almost 4000 years, have been found there.

Later, the desert was home to Turkic peoples. The Indo-European-speaking Tocharians were gradually included into the Turkic Uyghurs who migrated into the Tarim Basin around the 9th century. Beginning with the Han dynasty, Chinese leaders sometimes controlled the oasis towns to manage important Silk Road trade routes in Central Asia. Control shifted between Chinese, Turkic, Mongol, and Tibetan groups over time. Today, the area is mostly home to Turkic Uyghur people and ethnic Han Chinese.

Scientific exploration

Many smart people have studied this desert. In the 600s, a Buddhist monk named Xuanzang explored it. Much later, in the 1900s, an archaeologist named Aurel Stein also looked around.

Scientists found that dust from the Taklamakan Desert travels across the ocean to the Western United States. This dust helps make clouds and brings minerals there through rain. One special mineral in the dust, called K-feldspar, helps create ice very well. In May 2023, China planned to drill a very deep hole, about 11 kilometres deep, to learn more about the layers under the ground there. This won’t be as deep as the deepest hole ever made, called the Kola Superdeep Borehole.

Transportation

Main article: Tarim Basin § Roads and Transportation

The Taklamakan Desert has a special railway loop around it. The Southern Xinjiang Railway starts near Turpan, goes north to Kashgar, and then turns southeast to Khotan. Another railway, the Hotan–Ruoqiang railway, goes around the south and west side. Together, these railways make up four different rail lines in the area, including parts of the Golmud–Korla railway, Hotan–Ruoqiang railway, Kashgar–Hotan railway, and Southern Xinjiang railway. There are also roads and highways you can use in the desert.

In popular culture

The Taklamakan Desert appears in several stories and shows. It is the main setting for the Chinese films Painted Skin and Painted Skin: The Resurrection. The Chinese TV series Candle in the Tomb takes place mostly in this desert as characters search for the Niya ruins.

The desert is also featured in Neil Gaiman's comic book The Sandman, in an issue called Soft Places, where Marco Polo gets lost. In the Korean drama Queen Seondeok, a character named Sohwa raises her daughter, Deokman, in the desert. When Deokman is older, she returns and uses what she learned from traders to help her become leader of her kingdom.

The desert appears in the Japanese animation Mobile Suit Gundam 00, set in the year 2307. In the show, the desert is where a big military operation happens.