Crossing the Taklamakan — The World's Longest Desert Highway

The Tarim Desert Highway runs about 522 kilometres from Luntai in the north to Minfeng in the south, straight across the Taklamakan — the longest road ever built through shifting sand desert. It opened in the mid-1990s to serve the oil fields in the middle of the basin, and it cut a journey that used to mean going the long way around the entire desert down to a single day’s drive.

The remarkable thing isn’t that it was built. It’s that it’s still there.

Why it hasn’t been buried

The Taklamakan is a sand sea — dunes up to 200 metres, almost entirely mobile, migrating with the prevailing wind. Laying asphalt across that is straightforward. Keeping it clear is not; without intervention the road would have disappeared within a few years.

The solution was biological. A shelterbelt of drought-tolerant shrubs — tamarisk, saxaul, calligonum — runs along both sides of the road for its full length, dozens of metres wide, holding the sand in place with root mass. It’s irrigated by drip line from wells sunk into the brackish groundwater beneath the desert, which turns out to be salty enough to kill most plants and tolerable to these.

That system needs tending, which is where the human part comes in. Pumping stations sit at roughly four-kilometre intervals, and each one is staffed — typically by a married couple, living in a small brick house beside the pumps, running the wells and watching the plants for months at a time.

Their nearest neighbour is four kilometres away. Their nearest shop is hours off. They are the reason the road exists in any practical sense, and meeting one is the most memorable thing about the drive.

The drive itself

It is one of the great monotonous journeys — and that’s meant admiringly. Sand to the horizon in every direction for hours, dunes marching across your field of view at a constant angle, and the green stripe of the shelterbelt running ahead of you to a vanishing point.

Tazhong (塔中), roughly halfway, is the oil town in the middle: fuel, food, basic accommodation, and a slightly surreal quality — a functioning settlement of a few thousand people with a thousand kilometres of sand around it.

The light does the work at either end of the day. An hour before sunset the dunes go orange and the shadows stretch across the road; after dark, with no settlement within a hundred kilometres, the sky is as good as anywhere on earth for stars.

Practical notes

• Fuel at both ends and at Tazhong. Don’t improvise this.
• Sandstorms close the road. Check locally before setting out; a storm out here means visibility of a few metres and blown sand across the surface.
• Summer is severe. Ground temperatures are extreme and a breakdown becomes serious quickly. Spring and autumn are far more sensible.
• Water and shade. More than you think, in the vehicle, always.
• Don’t stop on the road. Traffic is sparse but fast, and there are no verges to speak of. Use the marked pull-offs.

There’s now a second crossing further west — the Aral–Hotan highway, around 424 km — plus a newer eastern route, so the Taklamakan has three roads through it where thirty years ago it had none.

Either end delivers you somewhere worth being: Kashgar and the southern oasis chain to the west, or Turpan and the northern Silk Road to the east. And off the southern edge, up the Keriya riverbed, is Daliyabuyi — the village in the middle of all this.