Tarim Basin
The Tarim Basin stretches across roughly 888,000 square kilometres in Xinjiang, Northwestern China. It is ringed on the north by the Tian Shan mountains and on the south by the Kunlun Mountains, sitting on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. At its heart lies the Taklamakan Desert, one of the driest places on earth, dominating so much of the interior that most of the basin cannot support permanent habitation. Uyghur speakers knew this vast depression by a name that has endured for centuries: Altishahr, meaning 'six cities'. What kind of place earns a name like that? Who built those cities, and how did people survive in a landscape hemmed in by desert and mountain? Beneath the sand, geologists have found sedimentary layers more than 15 kilometres thick, soaked in petroleum and natural gas. On the surface, armies, empires, monks, merchants, and caravans have crossed the basin for thousands of years, threading through the oases that line its edges like beads on a string. A 750-kilovolt power loop, completed in 2025, now encircles the entire basin, connecting wind farms, solar fields, and hydropower across five prefectures. The basin that once defined the ancient Silk Road is now being shaped into a new kind of crossroads, one built on high-voltage transmission lines rather than camel tracks.
The Yarkand, Kashgar, and Aksu rivers join forces inside the basin to form the Tarim River, which runs along the northern rim of the Taklamakan. The Tarim does not reach the sea. It once emptied into a body of water near the ruined city of Loulan, but sometime after 330 AD the river shifted course southeast toward Charkilik, and Loulan was abandoned. The Tarim eventually loses itself in Lop Nur, a marshy, saline depression at the basin's eastern end. Most rivers flowing north from the Kunlun dry up before reaching the Tarim at all; only the Hotan River makes the crossing in good years. Ruins scattered across the desert suggest that these rivers were once considerably larger than they are today.
The basin is surrounded by railways. The Southern Xinjiang Railway branches from the Lanxin Railway near Turpan, runs along the north side of the basin all the way to Kashgar, then curves southeast to Khotan. The Hotan-Ruoqiang railway loops around the south and west, completing a rail loop around the Taklamakan. Road access follows a similar pattern: highway 314 traces the north side from Urumqi to Kashgar, while highway 315 runs the south side from Kashgar east to Charkilik and then continues toward Tibet. The Tarim Desert Highway, described as a major engineering achievement, is the boldest of four north-south crossings, cutting directly through the center of the desert from Niya to Luntai. East of the Korla-Charkilik road, travel remains very difficult to this day.
The ancient caravan routes followed the same logic. Trade along the northern side of the basin was called the Tien Shan South Road, or Tien Shan Nan Lu in Chinese. The original route appears to have hugged the south side of the basin; when the Han dynasty consolidated control, trade shifted to a middle corridor through the Jade Gate and Loulan. After the Tarim River changed course around 330 AD, the main traffic moved north through Hami. Passes through the surrounding mountains connected the basin to Persia, India, the Ferghana Valley, and the Kazakh steppe. The route to India once started near Yarkand and Karghalik; it has since been replaced by the Karakoram Highway running south from Kashgar.
Around 2000 BC, six distinct cultural zones had already taken shape in the Tarim Basin. Bronze began appearing in the region at that time. One of these cultures, the Xintala culture, flourished roughly between 1700 and 1500 BC near the site of Yanqi, also called Karasahr, on the Kaidu River. Mud-brick structures found at Xintala show building techniques that parallel early oasis sites in western Central Asia. The Xintala people left behind no burials, and their settlements were small.
Genetic evidence suggests that the earliest Tarim people descended primarily from Ancient North Eurasian stock with significant Northeast Asian admixture. Mummies found at sites including Loulan and the Xiaohe Tomb complex were once suggested to be of Tocharian origin, but recent evidence points to a distinct population unrelated to later Indo-European pastoralists such as the Afanasievo. A study published by Zhang et al. in 2025 examined a Late Bronze Age site in the far west of the basin, dated between 1600 and 1400 BC. The people buried there overwhelmingly descended from the Sintashta and Andronovo populations, with additional ancestry from BMAC at roughly 10 percent and Tarim Early-Middle Bronze Age people at roughly 12 percent. Nearly all male subjects belonged to the Y-DNA haplogroup R-M17.
By the Iron Age, the Chawuhu culture had spread across the Yanqi oasis and northward toward the Turfan basin, lasting from roughly 1000 to 400 BC. For many years, earlier excavations in the 1990s placed the earliest fortified urban site at Yuansha in the Keriya river valley, around 400 BC. New surveys and excavations conducted between 2018 and 2020 overturned that picture. A site called Kuiyukexiehai'er, located in the northern Tarim Basin, turned out to be the earliest fortified urban settlement in the entire region, covering 6 hectares and developing in four distinct phases between roughly 770 BC and 80 AD. Spouted jars from this site resemble Chawuhu culture pottery, and buckles and moulds decorated with animal motifs echo steppe traditions.
Another people sharing the basin were the Saka, Indo-Iranian speakers known in ancient Chinese records as the Sai. According to Achaemenid Persian inscriptions at Persepolis dated to the reign of Darius I, who ruled from 522 to 486 BC, the Saka lived just beyond the borders of Sogdiana. A tomb in the Keriya region, at Yumulak Kum roughly 200 kilometres east of Khotan, has been dated to as early as the 7th century BC. Hundreds of jade pieces discovered in the Tomb of Fu Hao, dating to around 1200 BC, originated from the Khotan area on the southern rim of the basin, showing that trade connections across the desert were already ancient by the time the great empires arrived.
General Ban Chao, who lived from 32 to 102 CE, led the Han Chinese campaign that wrested control of the Tarim Basin from the Xiongnu at the end of the 1st century CE. After that victory, the Han administered the basin as the Protectorate of the Western Regions. The Kushans, who had earlier consumed the last remnants of the Indo-Greek Kingdom, pressed back into the basin in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE and established a kingdom in Kashgar, contesting the area with nomadic groups and Chinese forces.
The Yuezhi, who had been driven from Gansu by the Xiongnu ruler Modu Chanyu in 177-176 BC, played a quietly transformative role. As they moved westward, they introduced the Brahmi script, the Prakrit language for administrative use, and Buddhism. Their trade and missionary connections with the Tarim Basin left deep marks. The Guanzi philosophical text mentions nomadic pastoralists called the Yuzhi who supplied jade to China; scholars generally believe this compilation was assembled around 26 BC from older materials. Hundreds of jade pieces traced to Khotan found in the Tomb of Fu Hao, from around 1200 BC, show that such trade links stretch back even further.
During the Tang dynasty, Emperor Taizong launched a series of military campaigns against the oasis states. Gaochang was annexed in 640. Karasahr fell to the Tang in 644, and Kucha was conquered in 649. Taizong's successor, Emperor Gaozong, sent Su Dingfang in 657 to defeat the Western Turk qaghan Ashina Helu, after which the khaganate was absorbed into the Tang empire. The basin was administered through the Anxi Protectorate and the Four Garrisons of Anxi. The Tibetan Empire invaded these holdings in 670, and for the rest of the Tang period the basin alternated between Tang and Tibetan rule. The Buddhist monk Kumarajiva, from Kucha, visited China during the Six Dynasties period and became particularly renowned; music and dances from Kucha were popular throughout the Sui and Tang eras.
Sultan Satuq Bughra Khan converted to Islam in 966 while controlling Kashgar, making the Karakhanids the first Islamic Turkic dynasty. His son joined him in preaching Islam among the Turks, and his nephew or grandson Ali Arslan was killed by Buddhists during the ensuing wars. Buddhism steadily lost ground around Kashgar under Karakhanid pressure, and the Islamisation of the Tarim Basin extended across the following centuries.
The last holdout was Khotan, a city with an unusually long-documented history. Coins minted there in the 3rd century bear dual inscriptions in Chinese and Gandhari Prakrit in the Kharosthi script. The scholar Ronald E. Emmerick, a late Professor of Iranian Studies, argued that the royal rescripts of Khotan written in Khotanese Saka and dated to the 10th century make it likely the ruler of Khotan was an Iranian speaker. The name Khotan itself, in its oldest attested form hvatana, appears in texts of approximately the 7th to 10th century AD. Khotanese-Saka-language documents ranging from medical texts to Buddhist literature have been found primarily in Khotan and Tumshuq, northeast of Kashgar.
The Karakhanid ruler Musa attacked Khotan around the middle of the 10th century, and a long war followed. Khotan and Dunhuang had been close partners, with intermarriage between their ruling families and the Khotan royals funding the Mogao grottoes and Buddhist temples of Dunhuang, where their likenesses were painted. The war ended around 1006 when the Karakhanid leader Yusuf Qadir Khan conquered Khotan, ending its existence as an independent state. After news reached Dunhuang that Buddhist buildings in Khotan had been razed, Cave 17 was sealed shut, preserving its cache of Khotanese literary works for discovery centuries later. The conquest is recorded in a short Turkic poem attributed to the writer Mahmud al-Kashgari, which begins: "We came down on them like a flood, We went out among their cities, We tore down the idol-temples, We shat on the Buddha's head."
The Tarim Basin formed from the collision of an ancient microcontinent with the growing Eurasian continent during the Carboniferous to Permian periods. That process closed with the end of the Palaeo-Asian Ocean in the earliest Triassic. Today, the microcontinental crust is being pushed under both the Tian Shan to the north and the Kunlun Shan to the south. Sedimentary layers in the central basin reach locally more than 15 kilometres in thickness.
The source rocks for the basin's oil and gas are mostly Permian mudstones; Ordovician strata also contribute, having undergone intense Hercynian karstification that produced paleokarst reservoirs visible in the Tahe oil field. Below the hydrocarbon-bearing layers lies a Precambrian basement thought to be the remnants of the original Tarim microplate, which accreted to Eurasia in Carboniferous time. Methane makes up more than 70 percent of the natural gas reserve, with variable ethane content of less than 1 percent to around 18 percent, and propane of less than 0.5 percent to around 9 percent.
China National Petroleum Corporation explored the basin comprehensively between 1989 and 1995, identifying 26 oil- and gas-bearing structures. The targets sit at greater depths and in scattered deposits. On the 10th of June 2010, Baker Hughes announced an agreement with PetroChina Tarim Oilfield Co. to supply oilfield services including directional and vertical drilling for wells reaching deeper than 7,500 metres, under pressures greater than 20,000 psi and bottom-hole temperatures of approximately 160 degrees Celsius. In 2015, Chinese researchers published evidence of a vast, carbon-rich underground sea beneath the basin, a finding that added a new dimension to estimates of what the Tarim may still hold.
In 2025, China completed a 15-year infrastructure project encircling the Tarim Basin. The finished network is a 750-kilovolt extra-high voltage power loop running 4,197 kilometres, connecting wind, solar, thermal, and hydropower sources across five prefectures in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The project required the construction of nearly 10,000 transmission towers and nine substations. A significant portion of that work took place directly in the Taklamakan Desert, which covers about 60 percent of the basin. Workers laid roadbeds and installed sand-blocking vegetation systems to support logistics and stop dune migration.
The grid raised the region's power transmission capacity from 300,000 kilowatts to 3 million kilowatts. It also connects with the provincial grids of Qinghai and Sichuan, turning the basin from a receiver of Chinese infrastructure investment into a net supplier of energy to other parts of the country. The same desert that made the Tarim Basin nearly uninhabitable for much of human history now makes it valuable: vast, flat, and sun-drenched, with persistent winds blowing off the surrounding mountains. Khotan, whose jade and silk caravans once supplied the Chinese court, sits within this new loop, one node among many transmitting power east.
Common questions
What is the Tarim Basin and where is it located?
The Tarim Basin is an endorheic basin in Xinjiang, Northwestern China, covering about 888,000 square kilometres. It is bounded by the Tian Shan mountains to the north and the Kunlun Mountains to the south, with the Taklamakan Desert dominating most of its interior. The Uyghur name for it is Altishahr, meaning 'six cities'.
What is the historical significance of the Tarim Basin on the Silk Road?
The Tarim Basin contained three main Silk Road routes: a northern route, a southern route, and a middle route through the Lop Nur region. The middle route was the shortest but became deserted after the 6th century when the Lop Nur region turned uninhabitable. Caravan routes shifted over time based on changes in the Tarim River's course and political conditions along the Gansu Corridor.
Who were the Tarim mummies and what do they tell us about early Tarim Basin inhabitants?
The Tarim mummies were found in sites including Loulan and the Xiaohe Tomb complex in the eastern Tarim Basin. Genetic analysis indicates they belonged to a distinct population of primarily Ancient North Eurasian descent with significant Northeast Asian admixture, unrelated to later Indo-European pastoralists such as the Afanasievo. A 2025 study by Zhang et al. found that a Late Bronze Age site in the far west of the basin, dated 1600 to 1400 BC, was overwhelmingly populated by descendants of the Sintashta and Andronovo peoples.
When did Islam come to the Tarim Basin and how did Khotan fall?
The Karakhanid Sultan Satuq Bughra Khan converted to Islam in 966, making the Karakhanids the first Islamic Turkic dynasty. The Karakhanid leader Yusuf Qadir Khan conquered Khotan around 1006, ending its existence as an independent Buddhist state. News of the conquest prompted the sealing of Dunhuang's Cave 17, which preserved a cache of Khotanese literary works.
What oil and gas resources has the Tarim Basin been found to contain?
China National Petroleum Corporation's exploration between 1989 and 1995 identified 26 oil- and gas-bearing structures in the Tarim Basin. Methane comprises more than 70 percent of the natural gas reserve. In 2015, Chinese researchers published findings of a vast, carbon-rich underground sea beneath the basin.
What is the Tarim Basin high-voltage power loop completed in 2025?
In 2025, China completed a 750-kilovolt extra-high voltage power loop running 4,197 kilometres around the Tarim Basin, connecting wind, solar, thermal, and hydropower sources across five prefectures. The project took 15 years and required nearly 10,000 transmission towers and nine substations. It increased the region's power transmission capacity from 300,000 kilowatts to 3 million kilowatts and connects with the grids of Qinghai and Sichuan.
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