In China's Xinjiang region, there are rich and colorful ethnic minority cultures and magnificent landforms.
And in the eastern part of the Southern Tarim Basin there is a mysterious place - Lop Nur -
Once China's second-largest inland lake, the place has long since become a barren sea of death, as the Taklamakan Desert near it was once barren.
Under the rendering of the popular online novels "Ghost Blowing Lights" and "The Mystery of Lop Nur", this place that has not seen people in history has added a bit of mystery.
Everything in nature is a gift to mankind.
It is this one that in Uyghur legends, the cursed desert was once a vast ocean millions of years ago, and it also gave birth to life here, which is the source of life of a party of water and soil.
But now the Taklamakan Desert is full of sand dunes, and the few dry grasses are like a twilight old man, walking at the end of his life.
Very little vegetation survives here, but geologists find shells in the soil.
It turned out that hundreds of millions of years ago, during the Cretaceous period of dinosaur domination, the movement of the earth's crust split the continents, and the sea water of distant lands flowed into the basin along the gully.
After tens of thousands of years of vicissitudes and vicissitudes, the collision and friction between continental plates have filled the ravines to form the Tibetan Plateau, and this area full of salty and wet sea water has become an inland sea.
Throughout Central Asia, because it is deep inland and far from the ocean, the humid and hot air is extremely difficult to enter, the wetlands and forests are slowly disappearing, and the people here are mostly nomadic for a living, and uncontrolled grazing has led to the gradual withering of oases.
Early human beings relied on the sky to eat, and the development and growth of communities was at the expense of nature.
The rise of the ancient Silk Road benefited the entire southern part of Taklamakan, and cities rose up in the yellow sand, relying on oases to build splendid civilizations.
In 1901, the ruins of the ancient city of Nyaya were discovered here, and this elite country that existed from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD built extremely reasonable convenience facilities such as ditches and water conservancy.
Artifacts unearthed in 1995 at Nyyaya Cemetery No. 1 reflect the mature and highly artistic handicrafts of the time.
Among them, the shape of iron tools such as shovels and sickles is almost the same as that used by farmers at that time.
The ancient country of Loulan, which has existed here for more than 800 years, is well known to the world with the excavation of "Loulan Beauty" in 1980.
Today, we can only rely on imagination to recreate the prosperous city where exotic women lived more than 4,000 years ago and the beautiful scenery we saw, leaving only the legends that disappeared.
Just like the lakes and oases that once existed here, they are hidden in the long river of history.
Many people speculate that the demise of Loulan Kingdom was due to the indiscriminate logging caused by the construction of solar tombs, so that this dry place far from the ocean lost the support of the woods, the loess turned into quicksand, and the city became a cemetery.
Others believe that the topographic problems left by crustal activity make it easier to accumulate sediment in the riverbed here, blocking the river channel and making the oasis a dryland.
In any case, years of demands from nature were finally paid off, and the yellow sand of Taklamakan blew all over the Tarim Basin.
In the 1970s, Lop Nur finally turned the "ear of the earth" that created a civilization into a "sea of death" that was difficult to grow.
Once inaccessible, rows of long-dead poplars can only be seen using their last strength to plunge their torsos into the sand to show the world their loneliness.
The Taklamakan Desert battlefield covers an area of 330,000 square kilometers, and it should be known that China's land area is more than 9.6 million square kilometers.
This basin, which penetrates deep into the hinterland of the northwest, cannot support human survival activities. In an age of population explosion, harnessing all available resources has become a top priority.
As the largest desert in China and the second largest mobile desert in the world, Taklamakan has an average annual precipitation of less than 100 millimeters, but the evaporation is as high as 3,400 millimeters.
Such a land that is difficult to conceive life is still spreading its claws around, and if it is left unchecked, it is a boiled frog in warm water, waiting to be swallowed up by the desert if it is not treated.
Since the 1980s, China has shifted from blindly seeking production indicators to making simultaneous progress in environmental governance.
Although China has a long coastline in the southeast and the South China Sea, it has been plagued by drought and yellow sand in the northwest and northern inland.
By artificially laying grass squares, this way of windproof sand fixation and water retention has prevented the migration and expansion of the desert, and the use of planting windproof forest belts, water diversion and flood siltation have been effectively treated.
The Maowusu Desert is about to disappear from Shaanxi after decades of governance.
The area north of the Great Wall in Yulin, Shaanxi Province, once covered an area of 42,200 square kilometers, but in a report released in April 2020, its desertification land treatment rate has exceeded 93%.
Through the work of researchers and forestry workers, the desertification control north of the Yellow River now has extremely optimistic prospects, and most of them have now regained the beautiful scenery of the oasis.
However, these excellent governance cases still fail to make the governance of the Taklamakan Desert have obvious results.
The history of Taklamakan desertification is too long, millions of years of spread, and the basin far from the water source is like a bottomless gluttony that brings water, civilization, and life into its belly.
Its love is too inclusive, there is no dignity here, and death is fair to everything.
Although the desert no longer threatens nearby land by creating windbreaks and laying grass well grids, extreme weather deep inland and very little precipitation cannot overcome the extreme evaporation.
It's not easy to be completely green, so use the resources here.
The desert is naturally the most sandy. In the construction of sand and gravel is the most basic material, there is a huge demand.
Although sand in the desert cannot be used directly to build buildings, it can still be used as a building material by adding sticky substances.
However, the Tarim Basin is too far away from the more economically developed areas, and areas that do not even send free shipping cannot save the near fire in the pursuit of cost reduction in the economy and society.
It is not economical to use it on the ground, but what about under the ground.
At the end of the 1980s, the strategic deployment of "stabilizing the east and developing the west" established the development layout of the petroleum industry.
In 1989, tarim oil exploration and development headquarters discovered oil fields and natural gas here, and nature can provide wealth even in the harshest areas.
Because of the abundance of oil, the former poor small fishing village has become a luxurious cosmopolitan city. The UAE's take-off has allowed the world to witness the wonders of soft gold.
The west-to-east gas transmission of the Tarim Oilfield has injected blood into China's economic construction, but this barren land has brought vitality to the construction of other parts of our country.
However, the huge proceeds of resource extraction for desert control are still not significant.
The natural conditions here are extremely scarce and the climate is harsh, and even the richest people cannot improve the natural conditions.
Through a large amount of capital investment and equipment research and development, the UAE can desalinate the sea and nourish the desert.
But Taklamakan is located deep inland, the road into the area is extremely treacherous, there are no tantalizing myths, only terrible cannibalism, and the North East China Sea diversion is almost an impossible project.
Just when everyone is thinking about where to find a large amount of water, in fact, under the thick desert, there is an aquifer up to two kilometers deep.
It's called the Sea of Death, but it once had a source of life.
This source has not disappeared, part of it is buried in the ground by the soil, some of it has evaporated by high temperatures to become ice and snow on the surrounding mountains, and the stored ice and snow melts and then continuously penetrates into the desert underground.
According to expert surveys, the water storage capacity under the Taklamakan Desert is equivalent to three thousand Qinghai Lakes. This surprising news provides new ideas for desert governance, but it is difficult to implement.
The first is that the reservoir is too far from the ground to be inaccessible and unable to mobilize construction resources efficiently.
The most important thing is that taking water from the ground will cause serious subsidence and collapse, and if you are not careful, the construction team on the ground will not be able to survive, shake the soil layer deep, and may cause more serious geological disasters.
The Tarim Basin once flowed with seawater, the salt content is extremely high, these waters can not be used directly, the desalination of the seawater consumption of financial and material resources will make the treatment effect not economical.
For the society that is now seeking development everywhere, it is difficult to increase investment in governance.
However, the governance of the environment is a great cause that benefits future generations, and the so-called merit is in the present.
The governance of the desert cannot be ignored, and our country has not given up for a moment. With the development of science, the people have also begun to pay attention to the people's livelihood and the environment.
In order to support the country's environmental construction, relying on unique natural scenery, desert tourism has become a popular option for travel.
Some people like vibrant green, while others like a decadent doomsday style.
With its unique landscape and splendid history and culture, the Taklamakan Desert not only attracts tourists from all over the country but also makes foreign tourists yearn for it.
Since the British expeditions entered this land in the eighteenth century, the western style far from the Civilization of the Central Plains has gradually unveiled its veil, giving us a more comprehensive understanding of the diversity of the country's culture.
In the Xinjiang region, which has always been known for its multi-ethnic culture, in order to develop backward areas with complex terrain, people have volunteered to come here to build the motherland's rivers.
No matter how sophisticated technology is, it can't match the human desire to survive and the strong initiative inspired by the pursuit of a better life.
Time and time again, we transform the world into the way we want it to be, and nature evolves us step by step into life that is more suitable for living in it.
The flow of tourists makes the desert need a lot of supporting facilities, and these constructions, once completed, can attract people to live.
With people there will be a way, the Taklamakan Desert has existed for millions of years, and its governance naturally cannot be achieved overnight, but the water drops are worn, as long as they do not give up and do not abandon, the desert will always reappear on the oasis.
1. CNKI, Taklamakan "Sea of Death" or "Sea of Hope"; Hu Wenkang; Fan Shucai; Pamir, 2005.08;
2. CNKI; The Sea of Death Is Recovering; Zhang Jisheng; Science Enlightenment; No. 12, 1996;