Turpan

Turpan stands in a deep, hot basin on the northern routes of the Silk Road. Snowmelt from the surrounding mountains sustains a fertile oasis celebrated for its grapes and fruit. Underground channels known as karez carry water to fields while reducing evaporation, joining open canals in the task of irrigating a landscape where rain is scarce. Nearby lie the ruins of Jiaohe and Gaochang, earlier centres of the oasis and its Buddhist civilisation.

In the thirteenth century the Uyghur rulers of Gaochang submitted to Genghis Khan, and the oasis lived under the Yuan and the Chagatai khans. When rival Mongol princes besieged Gaochang in 1275, the Uyghur ruling house withdrew east to Yongchang. Islam spread among the oasis population in the late fourteenth century, and by the late Middle Ages the Turpan khanate contested Hami and the eastern trade routes with the Ming, sending missions to the Ming court. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Dzungar power reached the basin.

In the Qing–Dzungar wars the local leader Emin Khoja and many of his followers submitted to the Qing in 1720 and were moved east to Guazhou under Qing protection; they returned in the 1750s as Qing armies conquered Dzungaria. Emin Khoja's family kept hereditary authority under the Qing, and in 1777 his son built the Emin Minaret beside the oasis town.