The Silk Route

by

Wong,Yue-Kai -- LAWRENCE WONG( Guy Shuk , F5)

I came back from the Silk-Road trip on Oct. 13,1997 and the trip was just wonderful. My Silk-Road covered 3 provinces, namely Shaanxi (Capital City is Xi An),Gansu (Capital City is Lanzhou) and Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiou (Capital City is Urumqi or Urumchi).

The Flaming Mountain is called "Kizil Tag" in Uygur, meaning "Red Mountain"since it looks similar to fire flames both in shape and in colour.In the summer when the sun beats upon the red sandstone the sunlight flashing fire-red, and the ground temperature reaches 50 degrees C, the mountain looks as if it is really on fire, which is why it was called "Flaming Mountain". The weather was real fine with temperature of 27 degree C when I was there.

We passed the Turpan. The Tirpan Basin is extremely dry and blazingly hot in the summer. The water we drank came from underground.The snow melt from the Tianshan mountain seeps into the sandy ground as soon as it runs into the basin. Taking advantage of the natural incline of the land and the rich underground water course, the local people have created a unique irrigation system of their own, called the Karez. The Karez is composed of four sections: the vertical well, the underground canal, the surface canal ,and the pond.There are about 1,000 Karez in Turpan with a total length of about 5,000 km which provide the land with life-giving water.

Xinjian is a multi-nationality region with a population of more than 13 million, among them, the Uygur is the major ethnic group, the others are the Han, Kazak, Hui, Monogolian, ..... Tartar and Russian, totaling 13 nationalities. And we (13) from Hong Kong were the minority in Xinjian few weeks ago.

Mogao Grottoes, also known as Thousand Buddha's Grottoes, is the place you must visit when you are in Dunhuang City. Of the 492 Grottoes, more than 270 are decorated with Flying Apsaras ( Dunhuang frescoes ) of over 4500. To see those Flying Apsaaras, our tour guide had to open each cave door and led us to the center of the cave by flashing out her big electric torch. She moved her electric torch up to the top of the cave and we could see the painting of the Flying Apsaras made (printed) in Mid or Late Tang Dynasty. We went into almost ten caves, and in one big cave, we could see a group of coloured statues
made in the High-Tang Dynasty.

While we were still in Dunhuang, horse riding and camel riding was real fun on the Silk- Road trip. I was one day riding on a horse when we were in the Ruins of Yangguan Pass. I did have a sad felling when our tour quid mentioned the poem , some thing like"....... you won't have old friends when you are out the Yangguan Pass."

I have to sign off but I plan to the visit Nei Mongol Zizhiqu (Inner Mongolian Aut. Region) next October, Would you both like to join me ?