The Taklamakan Desert (also Taklimakan) is a desert of Central Asia, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. It is known as one of the largest sandy deserts in the world. It covers an area of 270,000 km2 of the Tarim Basin, 1,000 km long and 400 km wide. It is crossed at its northern and at its southern edge by two branches of the Silk Road as travellers sought to avoid the arid wasteland.

The Taklamakan Desert is one the world's major deserts, ranking 15th in size in a ranking of the world's largest non-polar deserts.

Oasis

There is no water on the desert and it was hazardous to cross. Takla Makan means go in and you'll never come out? Merchant caravans on the Silk Road would stop for relief at the thriving oasis towns. The key oasis towns, watered by rainfall from the mountains, were Kashgar, Marin, Niya, Yarkand, and Khotan (Hetian) to the south, Kuqa and Turfan in the north, and Loulan and Dunhuang in the east. Now many, such as Marin and Gaochang are ruined cities in sparsely inhabited dusty spots with poor roads and minimal transportation in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of the Peoples Republic of China.

The archeological treasures found in its sand buried ruins point to Tocharian, early Hellenistic, Indian and Buddhistic influences.

Mummies, some 4000 years old, have been found in the region. They show the wide range of peoples who have passed through. Some of the mummies appear European. Later, the Taklamakan was inhabited by Turkic peoples. Starting with the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese periodically extended their control to the oasis cities of the Taklamakan in order to control the important silk route trade across Central Asia. Periods of Chinese rule were interspersed with rule by Turkic and Mongol and Tibetan peoples. The present population consists largely of Turkic, Uyghur and Kazakh people.

The vast majority of rivers on the planet flow in a southerly direction because the source (usually in the mountains) is to the north of the mouth of the river. If the source of a river is at a higher elevation than the mouth, that river will run from the source to the mouth. However, if that (higher) source is to the south of the mouth, that river will then flow to the north (downhill).

Several rivers that flow north

Tarim Mummy

The Tarim mummies are a series of mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China, which date from 1800 BC to AD 200. The most remarkable features of these mummies, given the general location of these graves, are the Caucasoid physical type feature the corpses exhibit. The mummies, particularly the early ones, are associated with the presence of the Indo-European Tocharian languages in the Tarim Basin. The cemetery at Yanbulaq contained 29 mummies which date from 1800?00 BC, 21 of which are Caucasoid - the earliest Caucasoid mummies found in the Tarim basin -and 8 of which are of the same Caucasoid physical type found at Qawrighul.

Taklamakan Desert at Sunset