Ruins of Jiaohe and the Karez irrigation canals

For our full day in Turpan we visited two historic sites.  We passed a lot of markets on the way, the most interesting being the string bean collective. We've been cooking and eating these wonderful beans for a few weeks now and there were millions of them in this street market.  The vineyards were huge and widespread, these being one of the best grape growing regions in the country. 

The ancient city of Jiaohe was built between 700-800 AD. It is a fortified city with a natural river gorge on one side and a manmade canal on the other-both providing excellent protection from invaders. The city was carved out of the soft sedimentary mud and clay and fortified and further developed with mud brick. The city housed 8,000 and was a major commercial stop on the Silk Road. What you can't see from the photos and what we were not allowed to visit was the system of underground tunnels connecting the rooms of many of the buildings. It was hot yet dry. I likened this site to Petra in many regards. The monastary and Buddhist temple is the largest of this period in all of Xianjing province. 

After an ice cream and musk melon break we headed to the Karez exhibit. A "Karez" is an irrigation system of an underground channel, vertical access shafts, an open canal, and a collecting pond. There are over 5,600km of underground channels in the Turpan Basin.  The water source is the Tian Shan mountains. 

We toured the display facility where we were shown how they dug the vertical shafts, the channels, created the slope and collection systems. This process, all done by hand dates back to the 1st century. 

Today roughly 1/3 of the original Karez are in operation and there are no visible signs of conservation. Interesting!

 

 

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