Building highways through the desert is one of the engineering marvels of China.
Major Achievements
The Tarim Desert Highway – traversing the Taklimakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China – is not only the longest highway ever constructed in a desert but also a significant achievement in Chinese engineering.
This 522km route passes through one of the harshest regions on Earth, covering an area of 270,000km². The name of this desert, in Uyghur, means “can only be entered, but not exited.” For the Chinese, it is also referred to as “the Sea of Death.”
Since its construction in 1995, a persistent challenge for those building this road has been: how to prevent sand dunes from burying the highway? In the first ten years, the road was constantly affected by sand, terrain, and the environment, which “halted” numerous oil tanker trips from the Tarim Basin to the south.
The Tarim Desert Highway traverses the Taklimakan Desert.
To find a solution, engineers built a massive green belt on both sides of the highway, supported by drip irrigation systems to promote vegetation growth. This way, a dense belt of bushes and small trees would block the sand and keep the highway clear.
To maintain this vast infrastructure and ensure the road remains operational for oil transportation, the Chinese government has employed a large team of workers to monitor the highway. Every 4km, a small blue house is assigned to two Chinese workers, who specialize in overseeing and repairing the irrigation system along their stretch of the highway. Each pair stays for a maximum of two years and typically has no contact with anyone else during this time, including their neighbors.
Since 2003, China has planted about 2 million trees each year in this desert.
Since 2003, China has planted around 2 million trees annually, built dozens of water wells, and expanded the sand control belt to about 70 meters in width and 400 km in length. Tree planting along the Tarim Highway is being studied by scholars worldwide as a model for developing irrigation systems in arid regions.
In January 2022, the Tarim Oilfield branch of PetroChina launched a conversion project to transform all diesel generators into photovoltaic systems.
Solar power generators are also equipped with energy storage devices, ensuring stable power supply for maintenance workers.
Aerial view of a new highway through the Taklimakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwest China, on June 23, 2022. (Photo: Xinhua).
Aerial view of a new highway through the Taklimakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwest China, on June 25, 2022. (Photo: Xinhua)
Aerial view of a new highway through the Taklimakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwest China, on June 26, 2022. (Photo: Xinhua)
Workers laying grass mesh along the new highway through the Taklimakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwest China, on July 13, 2018. (Photo: Xinhua).
Other Routes
In addition to the main route spanning over 500km through the desert, China has also constructed other highways across deserts to support the livelihoods of the local population. Last year, the highway connecting Yuli County and Qiemo County – located south of the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang – became the third road to cross the Taklimakan Desert.
With a design speed of 60 or 80 km/h for different sections, the highway has a total length of 334 km, with 307 km traversing the desert. To date, China has over 1,200 km of highways crossing the Taklimakan Desert, the world’s second-largest shifting sand desert.
This highway was constructed with an estimated total investment of about 1.75 billion yuan (approximately 261.5 million USD) and began construction in October 2017.
The highway has shortened the travel distance between Qiemo County and the provincial capital, Korla, by about 350 km. It is expected that this road will improve the efficiency of transportation, reduce living costs, and facilitate agricultural product consumption.
Tursunjan Darman, a 51-year-old local resident of Qiemo County, stated that over the past few decades, travel time from Korla to Qiemo has been reduced from three days to just over ten hours, and now it only takes six hours.
Wang Yunfei, project director of China Communications Construction Company, the firm responsible for the project, noted that harsh weather conditions such as frequent sandstorms and difficulties in accessing water, electricity, communication signals, and daily necessities have made the construction of the desert highway a challenging task.
According to Wang, construction teams leveled 32 tall sand dunes and filled in 28 depressions between the dunes. To prevent the highway from being buried by sand, contractors established 58 million square meters of grass mesh and more than 900 km of barriers along the route.
The opening of the highway has boosted investor confidence in the areas along the route. A livestock company in Qiemo County has raised over 6,000 cattle. “The road has saved nearly 1,000 yuan per cow in transportation and feeding costs, and we plan to invest an additional 500 million yuan to expand our livestock operations,” said Guo Chengli, deputy director of the company.
