Hot is summer in this major tourist city of Xianjiang, situated in Turpan Basin, the lowest point on the mainland of China. The local people have developed karez, an irrigation system composed of wells connected by underground channels, to counter the heat and drought of the place. At the foot of the Flaming Mountain east of Turpan lies and Grape Gully (nickname: Green Pearl City"), an oasis where the scorching sun is shut off by luxuriant tree foliages and grapevine trellises that cover 220 hectares and are crisscrossed by irrigation ditches. No place in China is hotter in summer than the Flaming Mountain in Turpan, a mountain made famous by the classical Chinese mythological novel, Journey to the West. Xinjiang's largest ancient pagoda, Dorbiljin (Emin) Pagoda, (also called Sugong Pagoda) stands 2 km east of downtown Turpan. To the east lies Gaochang, which until the early Ming was a thriving town on the Silk Road; today it has been reduced to a 2 million-square-metre stretch of broken walls and deserted fields. The inexorable pace of history is even more keenly felt at Jiaohe, another ancient city that was deserted during the early Ming, leaving a pile of ruins west of Turpan.

The Flaming Mountains (Huo Yan Shan) are so named because in the evenings the red clay mountains reflect the heat and glow of the desert and seem to burn. Situated on the northern edge of the Turpan basin, and stretching over 100 km long and 10km wide, this is an intensely hot part of the desert with not a single blade of grass to be seen for miles. In the severe heat of July, the mountains seem to be on fire in the burning sun and become a purplish-brown color. Hot steam rises upwards from the burning cliffs and it is no surprise that this is where the hottest temperatures in China ever, were recorded!

Gaochang Ruins (Gaochang Gucheng) located East of Turpan, the Uigur city-state that ruled the area from around the 9th century to the 13th. The city was actually founded a few hundred years earlier than that, and gradually became known as a trading post on the Silk Road. Most of the ruins are gone, but enough remain to give a feeling of the true size and majesty of this Silk Road city. The city walls, made of earth, are set in a 5km square, with heights of up to 11 meters and width of 12 meters. The city is also divided into an outer city, an inner city, and a palace compound. The best-preserved structures in the ruins are two temple/monasteries in the southwest and southeast corners of the outer city section. In the southwestern temple, the front gate, courtyard, lecture hall, main hall, and monastic dormitories are relatively intact. The southeast temple has the only preserved fresco in the ruins.

Astana Graves (Asitana Gumuqun) lies to the northwest of the Gaochang Ruins, where the dead of Gaochang were buried. The ancient tombs are clearly zoned according to families and castes with natural stones. The burial area is large and stretches 5 km from east to west and 2 km from north to south. Unfortunately, today only a few of the tombs are open to tourists