Bortala

Bortala belongs to Dzungaria, the northern half of Xinjiang between the Altai Mountains and the Tian Shan. The name originally described the Western Mongolian Oirats, who were regarded as the left hand in the division of the Mongol Empire. Dzungaria covers a vast region of steppe, mountain-fed rivers, and open corridors.

Unlike the oasis settlements of the Tarim Basin to the south, it has enough grass to support extensive nomadic pastoralism and offers routes toward the western steppe. The Dzungarian Gate and the Ili valley became especially important passages between China and Central Asia. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dzungar Khanate made this grassland the center of a powerful steppe state. Its ruler Galdan Boshugtu Khan intervened in Kazakh affairs, but Qing campaigns destroyed Dzungar power around 1757–1759.

Qing authorities then resettled parts of the region with Han and Hui populations and governed Dzungaria separately from the Tarim Basin. Pastoralists, farmers, soldiers, merchants, and migrants followed different routes through the same broad basin. Bortala's setting therefore links high mountain snowmelt and irrigated farming with the older world of herds, migrations, and long-distance passage.