The Tarim Basin is an endorheic basin in Xinjiang, Northwestern China occupying an area of about and one of the largest basins in Northwest China.[Chen, Yaning, et al. "Regional climate change and its effects on river runoff in the Tarim Basin, China." Hydrological Processes 20.10 (2006): 2207–2216. ( online 426 KB)]
Geography and relation to Xinjiang
Xinjiang consists of two main geographically, historically, and ethnically distinct regions with different historical names,
Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin (
Altishahr), until it was merged into the Chinese Province of Xinjiang in 1884.
At the time of the Qing conquest in 1759, Dzungaria was inhabited by steppe-dwelling, nomadic Mongolic
Tibetan Buddhism Dzungar people,
while the Tarim Basin (Altishahr) was inhabited by sedentary, oasis-dwelling,
Turkic languages Uyghurs Muslim peasants.
Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin were each governed separately until the creation of Xinjiang province.
Tarim Basin locations
North side
The Chinese called this the
Tien Shan Nan Lu or Tien Shan South Road, as opposed to the
Bei Lu north of the mountains. Along it runs the modern highway and railroad while the middle Tarim River is about 100 km south. The caravans met in
Kashgar before crossing the mountains.
Maralbexi County or Miralbachi;
Uqturpan County north of the main road; Aksu on the large Aksu River;
Kucha was once an important kingdom;
Luntai County;
Korla, now a large town;
Karashar near
Bosten Lake;
Turpan north of the Turpan Depression and south of the
Bogda Shan;
Hami City; then southeast to
Guazhou County and the
Gansu Corridor.
Center
Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklamakan Desert which is too dry for permanent habitation. The
Yarkand River,
Kashgar River and Aksu Rivers join to form the
Tarim River which runs along the north side of the basin. Formerly it continued to
Loulan, but some time after 330 AD it turned southeast near Korla toward
Charkilik, and
Loulan was abandoned. The Tarim ended at the now-dry
Lop Nur, which occupied a shifting position east of Loulan. Eastward is the fabled
Jade Gate which the Chinese considered the gateway to the
Western Regions. Beyond that was
Dunhuang with its ancient manuscripts and then
Guazhou County at the west end of the
Gansu Corridor.
South side
Settlements include Kashgar;
Yangi Hissar, famous for its knives;
Yarkant County, once larger than Kashgar;
Kargilik County (Yecheng), with a route to India;
Karakax County;
Khotan, the main source of Chinese jade; eastward the land becomes more desolate;
Keriya Town (Yutian);
Minfeng Town (Minfeng);
Qiemo County (Cherchen);
Ruoqiang Town (Ruoqiang). The modern road continues east to Tibet. There is currently no road east across the
Kumtag Desert to Dunhuang, but caravans somehow made the crossing through the
Yangguan pass south of the Jade Gate.
Roads and transportation
Railways
The whole Tarim Basin and the Taklamakan Desert are surrounded by railroads. The Southern Xinjiang Railway branches from the
Lanxin Railway near Turpan, follows the north side of the basin to Kashgar, and curves southeast to Khotan, while Hotan–Ruoqiang railway loops around the south and west side of the Traim. They are part of the Taklimakan Desert railway loop, joined together with sections of the Golmud–Korla railway, Hotan–Ruoqiang railway, Kashgar–Hotan railway, and Southern Xinjiang railway.
Roads
The main road from eastern China reaches Ürümqi and continues as highway 314 along the north side to Kashgar. Highway 315 follows the south side from Kashgar to Charkilik and continues east to Tibet. There are currently four north–south roads across the desert. 218 runs from Charkilik to Korla along the former course of the Tarim, forming an oval whose other end is Kashgar. The Tarim Desert Highway, a major engineering achievement, crosses the center from
Niya Town to
Luntai. The new Highway 217 follows the Khotan River from Khotan to near
Aksu City. A road follows the
Yarkant River from Yarkand to
Baku. East of the Korla-Charkilik road, travel continues to be very difficult.
Rivers
Rivers coming south from the Tien Shan join the Tarim, the largest being the Aksu. Rivers flowing north from the Kunlun are usually named for the town or oasis they pass through. Most dry up in the desert; only the
Hotan River reaches the Tarim in good years. An exception is the
Qiemo River which flows northeast into Lop Nur. Ruins in the desert imply that these rivers were once larger.
Caravans and passes
The original caravan route seems to have followed the south side. At the time of the Han dynasty conquest, it shifted to the center (Jade Gate-Loulan-Korla). When the Tarim changed course about 330 AD it shifted north to
Hami. A minor route went north of the Tian Shan. When there was war on the Gansu Corridor trade entered the basin near Charkilik from the
Qaidam Basin. The original route to India seems to have started near Yarkand and Kargilik, but it is now replaced by the Karakoram Highway south from Kashgar. To the west of Kashgar via the
Irkeshtam border crossing is the
Alay Valley, which was once the route to Persia. Northeast of Kashgar the
Torugart pass leads to the
Ferghana Valley. Near
Uqturpan County the
Bedel Pass leads to
Lake Issyk-Kul and the steppes. Somewhere near Aksu the difficult
Muzat River led north to the Ili River basin (Kulja). Near Korla was the Iron Gate Pass and now the highway and railway north to Ürümqi. From Turfan the easy
Dabancheng pass leads to Ürümqi. The route from Charkilik to the
Qaidam Basin was of some importance when Tibet was an empire.
North of the mountains is Dzungaria with its central Gurbantünggüt Desert, Ürümqi, and the Karamay oil fields. The Yining City territory is the upper basin of the Ili River and opens out onto the Kazakh Steppe with several roads east. The Dzungarian Gate was once a migration route and is now a road and rail crossing. Tacheng or Tarbaghatay is a crossroads and former trading post.
Geology
The Tarim Basin is the result of an amalgamation between an ancient
microcontinent and the growing Eurasian continent during the
Carboniferous to
Permian periods, a process which ended in the earliest
Triassic with the closure of the Palaeo-Asian Ocean.
At present, deformation around the margins of the basin is resulting in the microcontinental crust being pushed under
Tian Shan to the north, and
Kunlun Shan to the south.
A thick succession of Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary rocks occupy the central parts of the basin, locally exceeding thicknesses of . The of oil and gas tend to be mostly Permian mudstones and, less often, Ordovician strata which experienced an intense and widespread early Variscan orogeny karstification.
The snow on the Karakoram mountain range flows into which move down the valleys to melt. The melted water forms rivers which flow down the mountains and into the Tarim Basin, never reaching the sea. Surrounded by desert, some rivers feed the oases where the water is used for irrigation while others flow to salt lakes and marshes.
Lop Nur is a , saline depression at the east end of the Tarim Basin. The Tarim River ends in Lop Nur.
The Tarim Basin is believed to contain large reserves of petroleum and natural gas.
In 2015, Chinese researchers published the finding of a vast, carbon-rich underground sea beneath the basin.[
]
History
It is speculated that the Tarim Basin may be one of the last places in Asia to have become inhabited: It is surrounded by mountains and irrigation technologies might have been necessary.
[
]
The Northern Silk Road on one route bypassed the Tarim Basin north of the Tian Shan mountains and traversed it on three oases-dependent routes: one north of the Taklamakan Desert, one south, and a middle one connecting both through the Lop Nur region.
-
The northern Tarim route ran from Kashgar via Aksu, Kucha, Korla, through the Iron Gate Pass, then Karasahr, Jiaohe Ruins, Turpan, Gaochang and Kumul to Anxi.
-
The southern Tarim route ran from Kashgar through Yarkant, Kargilik Town, Pishan, Khotan, Keriya Town, Niya, Qarqan, Qarkilik, Miran and Dunhuang to Anxi.
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The middle Tarim route, the shortest of the four, connected Korla on the northern Tarim route through Loulan and across the Lop Nur region and Dunhuang on the southern Tarim route. The Lop Nur region became uninhabitable in the 4th century and the middle route has been deserted since the 6th century.
Early periods
In the early period, beginning around 2000 BC, there were six different cultural zones in the Tarim Basin, and bronze began to appear. One of these cultures was the Xintala culture (–1500 BC), near the site of Yanqi, also known as
Karasahr, to the north and east of the Tarim, at the
Kaidu River.
Structures made of mud bricks were found at
Xintala, showing building techniques similar to those seen in early oasis sites in western Central Asia, as well as in
Yanbulake. There were no burials in Xintala culture, and its settlements were small.
Autosomal genetic evidence suggests that the earliest Tarim people arose from locals of primarily Ancient North Eurasian descent with significant Northeast Asian admixture. The Tarim mummies have been found in various locations in the eastern Tarim Basin such as Loulan, the Xiaohe Tomb complex, and Qäwrighul. These mummies have previously been suggested to be of Tocharians origin, but recent evidence suggests that the mummies belonged to a distinct population unrelated to later Indo-European pastoralists, such as Afanasievo.
In the Iron Age, the Chawuhu culture (c. 1000–400 BC) flourished in the Yanqi (Karashar) oasis, and also reached the Alagou sites near the Turpan basin, and north to the region close to Ürümqi.
Earlier diggings in the southern Tarim Basin, in the 1990s, suggested that Yuansha (Djoumbulak Koum) in the Keriya River valley was the earliest fortified urban site, from around 400 BC, but new surveys and excavations between 2018 and 2020, showed that the site Kuiyukexiehai'er (Koyuk Shahri), located in the northern Tarim Basin, is actually the earliest fortified urban settlement in the entire region, covering 6 hectares, and developed in four phases between c. 770 BC and 80 AD. Spouted jars were found at this site, similar to those of Chawuhu culture, and buckles and moulds with animal motifs resemble steppe traditions.
Another people in the region besides these Tarim people were the Indo-Iranians Saka people, who spoke various Eastern Iranian Saka language or Saka dialects. In the Achaemenid era Old Persian inscriptions found at Persepolis, dated to the reign of Darius I (r. 522–486 BC), the Saka are said to have lived just beyond the borders of .
According to the Sima Qian's Shiji, the nomadic Indo-European Yuezhi originally lived between Tengri Tagh (Tian Shan) and Dunhuang in Gansu, China.
Han dynasty
Around 200 BCE, the Yuezhi were overrun by the
Xiongnu. The Xiongnu then tried to invade the western region of China, but ultimately failed and lost control of the region to the Chinese. The Han Chinese wrested control of the Tarim Basin from the Xiongnu at the end of the 1st century under the leadership of General
Ban Chao (32–102 CE), during the
Han-Xiongnu War.
The Chinese administered the Tarim Basin as the Protectorate of the Western Regions. The Tarim Basin was later under many foreign rulers, but ruled primarily by Turkic, Han, Tibetan, and Mongolic peoples.
The powerful Kushans, who conquered the last vestiges of the Indo-Greek Kingdom, expanded back into the Tarim Basin in the 1st–2nd centuries CE, where they established a kingdom in Kashgar and competed for control of the area with and Chinese forces. The Yuezhi or Rouzhi (, ) were an ancient people first reported in Chinese histories as nomadic pastoralists living in an arid grassland area in the western part of the modern Chinese province of Gansu during the 1st millennium BC. After a major defeat by the Xiongnu, in the 2nd century BC, the Yuezhi split into two groups: the Greater Yuezhi ( Dà Yuèzhī 大月氏) and Lesser Yuezhi ( Xiǎo Yuèzhī 小月氏). They introduced the Brahmi script, the Indian Prakrit language for administration, and Buddhism, playing a central role in the Silk Road transmission of Buddhism to Eastern Asia.
Three pre-Han texts mention peoples who appear to be the Yuezhi, albeit under slightly different names.
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The philosophical tract Guanzi (73, 78, 80 and 81) mentions nomadic pastoralists known as the Yúzhī 禺氏 (Old Chinese: *ŋʷjo-kje) or Niúzhī 牛氏 (Old Chinese: *ŋʷjə-kje), who supplied jade to the Chinese.
["Les Saces", Iaroslav Lebedynsky, , p. 59] (The Guanzi is now generally believed to have been compiled around 26 BC, based on older texts, including some from the Qi state era of the 11th to 3rd centuries BC. Most scholars no longer attribute its primary authorship to Guan Zhong, a Qi official in the 7th century BC.[Liu Jianguo (2004). Distinguishing and Correcting the pre-Qin Forged Classics. Xi'an: Shaanxi People's Press. . pp. 115–127]) The export of jade from the Tarim Basin, since at least the late 2nd millennium BC, is well-documented archaeologically. For example, hundreds of jade pieces found in the Tomb of Fu Hao (c. 1200 BC) originated from the Khotan area, on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin. According to the Guanzi, the Yúzhī/Niúzhī, unlike the neighbouring Xiongnu, did not engage in conflict with nearby Chinese states.
-
The Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven (early 4th century BC) also mentions the Yúzhī 禺知 (OC: *ŋʷjo-kje).
-
The Yi Zhou Shu (probably dating from the 4th to 1st century BC) makes separate references to the Yúzhī 禺氏 (OC: *ŋʷjo-kje) and Yuèdī 月氐 (OC: *ŋʷjat-tij). The latter may be a misspelling of the name Yuèzhī 月氏 (OC: *ŋʷjat-kje) found in later texts, composed of characters meaning "moon" and "clan" respectively.
Sui–Tang dynasties
After the Han dynasty, the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin began to have strong cultural influences on China as a conduit between the cultures of India and Central Asia and China. Indian Buddhists had previously travelled to China during the Han dynasty, but the Buddhist monk Kumārajīva from
Kucha, who visited China during the
Six Dynasties period was particularly renowned. Music and dances from Kucha were also popular in the Sui and Tang periods.
During the Tang dynasty, a series of military expeditions were conducted against the oasis states of the Tarim Basin, then vassals of the Western Turkic Khaganate.
The expansion into Central Asia continued under Taizong's successor, Emperor Gaozong, who dispatched an army in 657 led by Su Dingfang against the Western Turk qaghan Ashina Helu.
Kingdom of Khotan
As a consequence of the Han–Xiongnu War from 133 BC to 89 AD, the Tarim Basin region of Xinjiang in Northwest China, including the Saka-founded oasis city-state of Khotan and Kashgar, fell under
Han Chinese influence, beginning with the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BC) of the
Han dynasty.
[Loewe, Michael. (1986). "The Former Han Dynasty," in The Cambridge History of China: Volume I: the Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C. – A.D. 220, 103–222. Edited by Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 197–198. .][Yü, Ying-shih. (1986). "Han Foreign Relations," in The Cambridge History of China: Volume I: the Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C. – A.D. 220, 377–462. Edited by Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 410–411. .] Much like the neighboring people of the Kingdom of Khotan, people of Kashgar, the capital of the
Shule Kingdom, spoke
Saka language, one of the Eastern Iranian languages.
[Xavier Tremblay, "The Spread of Buddhism in Serindia: Buddhism Among Iranians, Tocharians and Turks before the 13th Century", in The Spread of Buddhism, eds Ann Heirman and Stephan Peter Bumbacker, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2007, p. 77.] As noted by the Greek historian Herodotus, the contemporary Persians labelled all Scythians "Saka".
Indeed, modern scholarly consensus is that the Saka language, ancestor to the
Pamir languages in
northern India and Khotanese in
Xinjiang, belongs to the Scythian languages.
[Kuz'mina, Elena E. (2007). The Origin of the Indo Iranians. Edited by J.P. Mallory. Leiden, Boston: Brill, pp 381–382. .]
During China's Tang dynasty (618–907 AD), the region once again came under Chinese suzerainty with the campaigns of conquest by Emperor Taizong of Tang (r. 626–649).[Xue, Zongzheng (薛宗正). (1992). History of the Turks (突厥史). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, pp. 596–598. ; OCLC 28622013] From the late 8th to 9th centuries, the region changed hands between the Chinese Tang Empire and the rival Tibetan Empire.[Beckwith, Christopher. (1987). The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp 36, 146. .][Wechsler, Howard J.; Twitchett, Dennis C. (1979). Denis C. Twitchett; John K. Fairbank, eds. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 3: Sui and T'ang China, 589–906, Part I. Cambridge University Press. pp. 225–227. .] By the early 11th century the region had fallen to the Muslim Turkic peoples of the Kara-Khanid Khanate, which led to both the Turkification of the region and its conversion from Buddhism to Islam.[Scott Cameron Levi; Ron Sela (2010). Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources. Indiana University Press. pp. 72–. .][Ahmad Hasan Dani; B. A. Litvinsky; Unesco (1 January 1996). History of Civilizations of Central Asia: The crossroads of civilizations, A.D. 250 to 750. UNESCO. pp. 283–. .]
Suggestive evidence of Khotan's early link to India are minted coins from Khotan dated to the 3rd century, bearing dual inscriptions Chinese language and Gandhari Prakrit in the Kharosthi script.[Emmerick, R. E. (2003) "Iranian Settlement East of the Pamirs", in Ehsan Yarshater (ed), The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol III: The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, Part 1 (reprint edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 265.] Although Prakrit was the administrative language of nearby Shanshan, 3rd-century documents from that kingdom record the title hinajha (i.e. "generalissimo") for the king of Khotan, Vij'ida-simha, a distinctively Iranian-based word equivalent to the Sanskrit title senapati, yet nearly identical to the Khotanese Saka hīnāysa attested in contemporary documents.
, king of Khotan. Khotan, 1st century CE.
Obv: Kharosthi legend, "Of the great king of kings, king of Khotan, Gurgamoya.
Rev: Chinese legend: "Twenty-four grain copper coin". British Museum]]
In Northwest China, Khotanese-Saka-language documents, ranging from medical texts to Buddhist literature, have been found, primarily in Khotan and Tumxuk (northeast of Kashgar).[Bailey, H.W. (1996) "Khotanese Saka Literature", in Ehsan Yarshater (ed), The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol III: The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, Part 2 (reprint edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 1231–1235.] Similar documents in the Khotanese-Saka language were found in Dunhuang dating mostly to the 10th century.
Turkic influx
After the collapse of the
Uyghur Khaganate of modern-day
Mongolia, Uyghur people migrated to the Tarim Basin and mixed with the Tocharians and converted to their religion, and adopted their method of oasis agriculture.
In the tenth century, the
Karluks,
,
Chigils and other Turkic tribes founded the Kara-Khanid Khanate in
Jetisu, Western
Tian Shan, and
Kashgaria.
Islamisation of the Tarim Basin
The Karakhanids became the first Islamic Turkic dynasty in the tenth century when Sultan Satuq Bughra Khan converted to Islam in 966 while he controlled Kashgar.
Satuq Bughra Khan and his son directed endeavors to preach Islam among the Turks and engage in conquests.
Satok Bughra Khan's nephew or grandson Ali Arslan was slain by the Buddhists during the war. Buddhism lost territory to the Turkic Karakhanid Satok Bughra Khan during the Karakhanid reign around Kashgar.
The Tarim Basin became Islamicized over the next few centuries.
Turkic-Islamic Kara-Khanid conquest of Iranic Saka Buddhist Khotan
In the tenth century, the Buddhist Iranic Saka Kingdom of Khotan was the only city-state that was not conquered yet by the Turkic Uyghur (Buddhist) and the Turkic Karakhanid (Muslim) states. The Buddhist entitites of Dunhuang and Khotan had a tight-knit partnership, with intermarriage between Dunhuang and Khotan's rulers and Dunhuang's Mogao grottos and Buddhist temples being funded and sponsored by the Khotan royals, whose likenesses were drawn in the Mogao grottoes.
Halfway in the 10th century Khotan came under attack by the Karakhanid ruler Musa, a long war ensued between the Turkic Karakhanid and Buddhist Khotan which eventually ended in the conquest of Khotan by Kashgar by the Karakhanid leader Yusuf Qadir Khan around 1006.
Accounts of the Muslim Karakhanid war against the Khotanese Buddhists are given in
Taẕkirah of the Four Sacrificed Imams written sometime in the period from 1700 to 1849 which told the story of four imams from Mada'in city (possibly in modern-day Iraq) who traveled to help the Islamic conquest of Khotan, Yarkand, and Kashgar by Yusuf Qadir Khan, the Karakhanid leader.
The "infidels" were defeated and driven towards Khotan by Yusuf Qadir Khan and the four Imams, but the Imams were assassinated by the Buddhists prior to the last Muslim victory. After Yusuf Qadir Khan's conquest of new land in Altishahr towards the east, he adopted the title "King of the East and China".
In 1006, the Muslim Kara-Khanid ruler Yusuf Kadir (Qadir) Khan of Kashgar conquered Khotan, ending Khotan's existence as an independent state. The Islamic conquest of Khotan led to alarm in the east and Dunhuang's Cave 17, which contained Khotanese literary works, was closed shut possibly after its caretakers heard that Khotan's Buddhist buildings were razed by the Muslims, the Buddhist religion had suddenly ceased to exist in Khotan.
English translation:
We came down on them like a flood,
We went out among their cities,
We tore down the idol-temples,
We shat on the Buddha's head!
In Turkic:
kälginläyü aqtïmïz
kändlär üzä čïqtïmïz
furxan ävin yïqtïmïz
burxan üzä sïčtïmïz
Conversion of the Buddhist Uyghurs
The Buddhist Uyghurs of the Kingdom of Qocho and Turfan embraced Islam after conversion at the hands of the Muslim Chagatai Khizr Khwaja.
Kara Del was a Mongolian ruled and Uighur populated Buddhist Kingdom. The Muslim Chagatai Khan Mansur invaded and used the sword to make the population convert to Islam.
After being converted to Islam, the descendants of the previously Buddhist Uyghurs in Turfan believed that the "infidel Kalmuks" (Dzungar people) were the ones who built Buddhist monuments in their area, in opposition to the current academic theory that it was their own ancestral legacy.
Before Qing conquest
The eastern regions of the
Chagatai Khanate in the early 14th century had been inhabited by a number of Mongol nomadic tribes. These tribes resented the conversion of khan
Tarmashirin to Islam and the move of the khan to the sedentary areas of
Transoxiana. They were behind the revolt that ended in Tarmashirin's death. One of the khans that followed Tarmashirin,
Changshi, favored the east and was non-Muslim.
[Grousset, p. 341] In the 1340s as a series of ephemeral khans struggled to hold power in Transoxiana, little attention was paid by the Chagatayids to the eastern regions. As a result, the eastern tribes there were virtually independent. The most powerful of the tribes, the
Dughlats, controlled extensive territories in
Moghulistan and the western Tarim Basin. In 1347 the
decided to appoint a khan of their own, and raised the Chagatayid
Tughlugh Timur to the throne.
[Grousset, pp. 343–344]
In 1509 the Dughlats, vassal rulers of the Tarim basin, rebelled against the Moghulistan and broke away. Five years later Sultan Said Khan, a brother of the Khan of Moghulistan in Turfan, conquered the Dughlats but established his own Yarkent Khanate instead.[Grousset, p. 497] By the early 17th century, the Naqshbandi Sufi Khojas, descendants of Muhammad, had replaced the Chagatayid Khans as rulers of the Tarim Basin. There was a struggle between two Khoja factions: the Afaqi (White Mountain) and the Ishaqi (Black Mountain). The Ishaqi defeated the Afaqi and the Afaq Khoja invited the 5th Dalai Lama (the leader of the Tibetan people) to intervene on his behalf in 1677. The Dalai Lama then called on his Dzungar Buddhist followers in the Dzungar Khanate to act on the invitation. The Dzungar Khanate conquered the Tarim Basin in 1678, during the Dzungar conquest of Altishahr, after which they set up Afaq Khoja as their puppet ruler.
Qing dynasty
Xinjiang did not exist as one unit until 1884 under Qing rule. It consisted of the two separate political entities of Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin (Eastern Turkestan).
[ Michell 1870, p. 2.][ Martin 1847, p. 21.][ Fisher 1852, p. 554.][ The Encyclopædia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature, Volume 23 1852, p. 681.] Dzungharia or Ili was called Zhunbu 準部 (Dzungar region) Tianshan Beilu 天山北路 (Northern March), "Xinjiang" 新疆 (New Frontier),
[ Millward 1998, p. 21.] or "Kalmykia" (La Kalmouquie in French).
It was formerly the area of the
Dzungar Khanate 準噶爾汗國, the land of the
Dzungar people. The Tarim Basin was known as "Tianshan Nanlu 天山南路 (southern March), Huibu 回部 (Muslim region), Huijiang 回疆 (Muslim frontier), Chinese Turkestan,
Kashgaria, Little Bukharia,
East Turkestan", and the traditional Uyghur name for it was
Altishahr (,
Алтә-шәһәр).
[ Millward 1998, p. 23.] It was formerly the area of the Eastern
Chagatai Khanate 東察合台汗國, land of the
Uyghur people before being conquered by the Dzungars.
Demographics
The population of the Tarim Basin is estimated at approximately 5.5 million.
People of the Tarim Basin
According to census figures, the Tarim Basin is dominated by the
Uyghurs.
They form the majority population in cities such as
Kashgar,
Artush, and
Hotan. There are however large pockets of Han Chinese in the region, such as Aksu and
Korla. There are also smaller numbers of
Hui people and other ethnic groups, for example, the
Tajiks who are concentrated at
Tashkurgan Town in the Kashgar Prefecture, the
Kyrgyz people in Kizilsu, and the
Mongols in Bayingolin.
The language spoken by the earliest Tarim residents is unclear; however it is widely agreed upon that they would eventually be Indo-European speakers.[ (internal cross references omitted)] and genetics analysis also indicate that the population was of mixed ancestry in the bronze and iron age periods. Professor James A. Millward described the original Uyghurs as physically Mongoloid, giving as an example the images in Bezeklik at Temple 9 of the Uyghur patrons, until they began to mix with the Tarim Basin's original Tocharian and eastern Iranian inhabitants.
Archaeology
Although
archaeological findings are of interest in the Tarim Basin, the prime impetus for exploration was
petroleum and natural gas. Recent research with help of
GIS database have provided a fine-grained analysis of the ancient
oasis of Niya on the
Silk Road. This research led to significant findings; remains of hamlets with wattle and daub structures as well as farm land, orchards, vineyards, irrigation pools and bridges. The oasis at Niya preserves the ancient landscape. Here also have been found hundreds of 3rd and 4th century wooden accounting tablets at several settlements across the oasis. These texts are in the
Kharosthi script native to today's
Pakistan and
Afghanistan. The texts are legal documents such as tax lists, and contracts containing detailed information pertaining to the administration of daily affairs.
Additional excavations have unearthed tombs with Tarim mummies,[David W. Anthony, Tracking the Tarim Mummies, Archaeology, Volume 54 Number 2, March/April 2001] tools, ceramic works, painted pottery and other artistic artifacts. Such diversity was encouraged by the cultural contacts resulting from this area's position on the Silk Road.
Energy infrastructure
In 2025, China completed a 15-year infrastructure project encircling the Tarim Basin with a 750-kilovolt extra-high voltage power loop. The 4,197-kilometre (2,608-mile) network of transmission lines and substations connects multiple renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, thermal, and hydropower across five prefectures in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
This new grid significantly increases the region's power transmission capacity from 300,000 kilowatts to 3 million kilowatts and allows integration with other provincial grids, including Qinghai and Sichuan.
The project required the construction of nearly 10,000 transmission towers and nine substations, with much of the work taking place in the Taklamakan Desert, which covers about 60% of the basin. To support logistics and prevent dune movement, roadbeds and sand-blocking vegetation systems were implemented.
See also
Citations
Sources
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Baumer, Christoph. 2000. Southern Silk Road: In the Footsteps of Sir Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin. Bangkok: White Orchid Books.
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Hill, John E. 2004. The Peoples of the West from the Weilue 魏略 by Yu Huan 魚豢 : A Third Century Chinese Account Composed between 239 and 265 CE. Draft annotated English translation. [8]
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Hill, John E. (2009) Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes during the Later Han Dynasty, 1st to 2nd Centuries CE. BookSurge, Charleston, South Carolina. .
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Mallory, J.P. and Mair, Victor H. 2000. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. Thames & Hudson. London. .
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Stein, Aurel M. 1907. Ancient Khotan: Detailed report of archaeological explorations in Chinese Turkestan, 2 vols. Clarendon Press. Oxford. [9]
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Stein, Aurel M. 1921. Serindia: Detailed report of explorations in Central Asia and westernmost China, 5 vols. London & Oxford. Clarendon Press. Reprint: Delhi. Motilal Banarsidass. 1980. [10]
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Stein Aurel M. 1928. Innermost Asia: Detailed report of explorations in Central Asia, Kan-su and Eastern Iran, 5 vols. Clarendon Press. Reprint: New Delhi. Cosmo Publications. 1981.
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