The Taklamakan is a sand desert in Xinjiang, northwest China, covering about 337,000 km², slightly less than Germany. It fills most of the Tarim Basin and is enclosed by mountains on three sides: the Tian Shan to the north, the Pamirs to the west and the Kunlun to the south. To the east it opens towards the Gobi. Most of its surface is shifting dunes, usually about 18–91 m (60–300 ft) high. It is a cold desert: summers reach 40 °C, winters fall below −20 °C, and the oil town of Tazhong at its centre gets only about 26 mm of rain a year. The Silk Road went around its edges through oases such as Kashgar and Hotan. Today the 1995 Tarim Desert Highway crosses the middle, a 3,050 km green belt completed in 2024 encircles it, and its subsoil holds some of China’s major oil and gas fields.
This guide works from the outside in, starting with the mountain rim and rivers, then the oasis cities on the edge, the dune sea, and finally the roads, railways, tree belts and wells that now reach the centre.
The Mountain Rim: Tian Shan, Pamirs and Kunlun around the Tarim Basin
The Tarim Basin covers about 888,000 km² and is the largest basin in northwest China. It is an endorheic basin, which means none of its water reaches the sea. The Taklamakan’s 337,000 km² take up most of its floor. The mountains around it both create the desert and keep it alive. They block moist air, so the basin lies in the rain shadow of the Himalayan system and gets almost no rain. Their snow and glaciers also feed every river that reaches the sand.
Beneath the sand, the basin is a deep trough. Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary rocks fill its centre, in places more than 15 km thick. In May 2023 China announced plans to drill a borehole about 11 km deep in the desert to study those layers.
Rivers that die in the sand
On the western side, the Yarkand, Kashgar and Aksu rivers join to form the Tarim River, which runs east along the desert’s northern edge. It once ended in Lop Nur, a shallow, salty lake at the eastern end of the basin. Some time after AD 330 the Tarim changed course near Korla, and the oasis kingdom of Loulan lost its water and was abandoned. Lop Nur itself is now largely a dried-up salt lake. The rivers flowing north from the Kunlun are usually named after the oasis they water. Most of them disappear into the sand. In good years only the Hotan River crosses the whole desert to reach the Tarim, and the Qiemo flows northeast towards Lop Nur. Ruins deep in the dunes show that some of these rivers once flowed much farther.
Oasis Cities of the Silk Road Edge: Kashgar, Hotan and Kuqa
Caravans avoided the desert itself. The Silk Road split into a northern route along the foot of the Tian Shan and a southern route along the Kunlun. Both moved from oasis to oasis wherever mountain meltwater came out onto the plain. On the north were Kuqa, Aksu and Turpan. On the south were Yarkand, Khotan (Hotan), Niya and Miran. A middle route ran by Loulan and Lop Nur to Dunhuang, but once the Lop Nur area became uninhabitable in the 4th century it was used less and less, and by the 6th century it had been abandoned. Our Silk Road geography guide follows the whole network.
Kashgar, at the western end where the two routes met, has been an important oasis for more than 2,000 years. Caravans gathered there before crossing the Pamirs. It had 711,300 people in 2019 and lies near China’s borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It is a terminus of the Karakoram Highway to Pakistan, and in 2010 it became a Special Economic Zone. Over the centuries it was ruled by Chinese, Turkic, Mongol and Tibetan powers.
Hotan, on the southwestern edge, had 408,900 people in 2018. It depends on two rivers coming down from the Kunlun, the Karakash (Black Jade) and the White Jade. They irrigate the oasis, and their beds yield the white river stones of nephrite that made Hotan, according to Chinese historical sources, the main source of jade in ancient China. The Buddhist monk Xuanzang recorded about 100 temples there around 630.
Buried towns: Niya, Miran and Loulan
When rivers shrank or shifted, oases were abandoned and the sand covered them. In the early 20th century, explorers including Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Paul Pelliot explored and excavated sand-buried sites such as Niya, Miran and Loulan. Their finds showed Tocharian, early Hellenistic, Indian and Buddhist influences. Mummies up to about 4,000 years old have been found in the basin. More recent excavations at Kuiyukexiehai’er (Koyuk Shahri) on the northern edge found a 6-hectare fortified town that was occupied from about 770 BC to AD 80. The Indo-European-speaking Tocharians were later absorbed by Turkic Uyghurs, who moved into the basin around the 9th century. Most of the population today is Uyghur or Han Chinese.
Into the Dunes: Sand, Dust and 26 mm of Rain at Tazhong
Away from the river margins, the Taklamakan is a shifting-sand desert. In rankings of the world’s deserts by area it is about 15th. Most of it is dunes, broken only by small patches of alluvial clay. The steep slip faces point away from the prevailing wind, and the dunes advance across anything in their path. One resident of Qira County, on the southern edge, described waking to find his door blocked and his crops buried by sand that had blown in overnight, which forced him to move. The Mazartag hills rise from the sand in the west, but most of the interior has no landmarks at all.
The climate is extreme. Tazhong, at 1,099 m in the centre of the desert, has average July highs of 36.3 °C and average January lows of −18.3 °C. It has recorded 45.6 °C in July and −32.7 °C in February. During the winter storms of 2008, the whole Taklamakan was reported to be covered by snow for the first time on record, a thin layer up to 4 cm deep, with temperatures as low as −26.1 °C.
Spring brings the worst sandstorms. As the dry, bare ground warms, convection lifts dust high into the air, especially over the southern part of the desert. Taklamakan dust travels a long way. Studies have traced it across the Pacific, where its potassium feldspar grains help ice form in clouds over the western United States. NASA’s MODIS satellite records show a decline in dust over the region of about 1.5% a year since the early 2000s.
What the name Taklamakan means
Popular books often translate the name as “place of no return”, but that is a folk etymology. Most researchers agree that makan comes from the Arabic makān, “place”. The first part is less certain. One theory links it to Arabic tark, “to abandon”. Another derives it from Turki taqlar makan, “place of ruins”. The Chinese scholars Wang Guowei and Huang Wenbi connected it to the Tocharians. According to the Uyghur researcher Turdi Mettursun Kara, its earliest written form is Terk-i Makan, in a book written in Hotan in 1867.
Roads, Rails, Green Belts and Oil Across the Centre
The Tarim Desert Highway, 1995
Oil brought the first road across the dunes. China National Petroleum Corporation surveyed the basin from 1989 to 1995 and identified 26 oil- and gas-bearing structures. To serve them, the Lunmin Highway was built between 1993 and 1995. It runs 552 km from Luntai, on the northern edge, to Minfeng, on the southern edge. About 446 km of it crosses uninhabited shifting dunes, making it the longest highway of its kind in the world. Planted shrubs anchor the sand on both sides, and they are watered by an irrigation system, with a maintenance shed every 4 km to keep the shrub belts alive. Two more desert crossings followed: a 156 km branch from Tazhong to Qiemo in 2002, and the 424 km Ahe Highway from Aral to Hotan, along the Hotan River, in 2007.
The railway loop and the 3,050 km green belt
Railways now go all the way around the desert. The 825.5 km Hotan–Ruoqiang line, built from December 2018 and opened on 16 June 2022, closed the Taklamakan railway loop. The loop is made up of four lines: the Southern Xinjiang, Kashgar–Hotan, Hotan–Ruoqiang and Golmud–Korla railways. It is the first railway loop around a desert anywhere. How these lines connect with older trade routes is covered in our Silk Road railways guide.
Tree planting has followed the rails. The Green Great Wall programme, launched in 1978 to slow desertification across northern China, reached a milestone in 2024 with the completion of a 3,050 km green belt all the way around the Taklamakan. It combines sand-fixing desert poplar, saxaul and red willow, planted heavily in southern counties such as Yutian, with solar-powered sand-control systems. China Three Gorges Corporation also plans 8.5 GW of solar and 4 GW of wind power in the region.
Oil and gas under the sand
Tazhong, in the middle of the desert, was created as a town on 24 July 2015. It usually has about 20,000 people, 90% of them temporary residents, and its economy is almost entirely oil. PetroChina’s Tarim Oilfield and Sinopec’s Northwest Oilfield both operate there. The oil and gas come mainly from Permian and Ordovician source rocks. At the Tahe field, they are held in ancient karst caverns. The basin’s gas is more than 70% methane. The West–East Gas Pipeline starts at Lunnan, on the basin’s northern edge, and runs about 4,000 km to Shanghai. Trial operation began on 1 October 2004, and full commercial supply started on 1 January 2005.
The Taklamakan is still one of the driest places in Asia, but it now has a road through its middle and towns built for oil workers. For comparison with China’s other great arid region to the east, see our guide to the Gobi Desert.