Turpan

The Turpan basin has been farmed and fought over for more than two thousand years. Its first known centre was Jiaohe, a city built on a steep-sided plateau between two river channels, capital of the Jushi kingdom and a place the Han dynasty contested with the Xiongnu in a long series of campaigns. Chinese settlers founded Gaochang on the plain to the east, and from the 5th century it was the seat of local dynasties, most durably the Qu family, whose rulers governed a Buddhist, Chinese-speaking city-state on the Silk Road.

The Tang absorbed the oasis in 640 and administered it as Xizhou; the monk Xuanzang stopped at Gaochang on his way to India and was pressed to stay. After the Tang withdrew, Uyghur groups displaced from Mongolia established the Kingdom of Qocho here in the 9th century, a state remembered for its Manichaean and Buddhist art, of which the Bezeklik murals are the surviving trace. Mongol overlordship followed, and from the 14th century the oasis converted to Islam, a change completed in the second half of the 15th century, after which the Buddhist caves were abandoned and many images defaced.

The Qing took the basin in the 18th century, and the Emin Minaret was begun in 1777 and finished the following year, in honour of the Turpan ruler Emin Khoja. In the early 20th century German, British, Russian and Japanese expeditions removed large quantities of murals, manuscripts and grave goods, much of which remains in foreign museums; some of the Bezeklik panels taken to Berlin were destroyed in the Second World War. In the modern era the oasis has lived on grapes, cotton, oil and coal, with the railway from 1962 and the high-speed line from 2014.

Turpan is a Uyghur oasis town, and its culture is that of the Tarim basin villages: Islam of the Sunni tradition, extended families, music played on the dutar and rawap at weddings, and a deep attachment to the vine. Grapes are more than a crop here; they shape the architecture, in the pierced brick drying houses that stand on every ridge, and the streets, which are roofed with vine trellises for shade. The image of Turpan raisins and melons is known across China.

Layers of older belief are visible in the landscape. Buddhist caves, Manichaean paintings and Nestorian Christian remains lie within a few kilometres of Muslim shrines, and the village of Tuyoq has been a pilgrimage site for centuries. The Flaming Mountains carry their own literary fame through Journey to the West, in which the monk's party must cross them, which brings Chinese visitors who come for the story as much as the geology.

Religious practice is tightly restricted across Xinjiang. Visitors are received warmly, but residents cannot safely discuss politics, religion or security, and those subjects are best left alone. Hospitality follows Uyghur form — tea and dried fruit offered immediately, food eaten with the right hand, guests urged to take more than they want.

About 690,000 people live in the Turpan municipality, most of them Uyghur, with Han and Hui minorities concentrated in the town and in the industrial areas. The built-up centre is small; the rest of the population is spread through farming villages across the irrigated land and along the roads that skirt the mountains.

Water rules everything. For centuries the oasis was watered by karez, a system of gently sloping underground tunnels that carries snowmelt from the Tian Shan foothills to the fields with little loss to evaporation, dug and maintained by hand over generations. Many channels have dried or been abandoned as deep wells, pumping and reservoirs took over, and the falling water table is a continuing worry. Grapes, cotton, melons and vegetables still dominate farming, and raisin processing, wine, textiles, oil and gas extraction, coal and a growing wind and solar industry make up the rest of the economy, with tourism important in the shoulder seasons.

Summer dictates the rhythm of the day. Work starts early, the middle of the day is spent indoors or under vines, and life resumes in the evening, when the bazaar and the pavement grills fill up and stay busy late — helped by the region running on Beijing time, two hours ahead of the sun. Security screening at stations, markets and road checkpoints is part of ordinary routine, and daily life is shaped by surveillance and by restrictions on religion and travel.

Turpan eats Uyghur food. Laghman, the hand-stretched noodle with a mutton and pepper sauce, and polo, rice pilaf cooked with lamb and carrot, are the staples, along with samsa, lamb and onion pastries baked on the walls of a tandoor, and manta, steamed dumplings. Kebabs of mutton on iron skewers, dusted with cumin and chilli, are grilled on pavements everywhere from spring to autumn, and dapanji, big-plate chicken with potatoes and wide noodles, appears on most menus.

Nan is the bread: baked in a clay oven, stamped in the middle, sold in stacks in the morning and eaten with everything. Cold dishes matter in the heat — chilled noodles with vinegar and garlic, cucumber salads, yoghurt sold thick and plain or with sugar, and hand-churned ice cream sold from brass drums in the bazaar.

Fruit is what Turpan is known for throughout China. Seedless white grapes dry into the green raisins sold by the sack, and figs, mulberries, apricots, pomegranates and Hami melons ripen through the summer. The vine also yields local wine and grape juice, sold to visitors in Grape Valley. Tea is drunk all day, often with dried fruit and rock sugar, and fresh pomegranate juice is pressed on the street in autumn.