Discover Xinjiang
Flaming Mountains
火焰山
A 100 km ridge of barren red sandstone north of Turpan, furrowed by erosion so that it appears to be burning in the afternoon sun, and immortalised as an obstacle in the novel Journey to the West. The visitor centre is dug underground and has a giant thermometer recording surface temperatures that regularly pass 70C.
The story
What makes this place special
The Flaming Mountains, Huoyan Shan, are barren eroded red sandstone hills in the Tian Shan running east to west across the Turpan depression, about 100km long and 5 to 10km wide, east of Turpan and near the northern edge of the Taklamakan. Erosion has cut the red bedrock into gullies and ribs that at certain times of day make the slopes look as if they are burning. The range is extremely hot: a satellite measurement of land surface temperature here recorded 66.8C in 2008, the highest on Earth that year, and a large thermometer sculpture beside the road tracks ground temperature for visitors. Wu Cheng'en's sixteenth-century Journey to the West gave the range its place in Chinese literature as a wall of flame barring the pilgrim's way, in a story loosely based on the seventh-century journey of Xuanzang. The Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves, around 70 grottoes dating from the fifth to the ninth centuries, lie in a gorge beneath the cliffs near the pass by Gaochang.
What you’ll discover
A long wall of corrugated red-brown rock with no vegetation at all, best seen from the roadside where the gullies run straight down the face. The developed stop has a plaza, an underground exhibition area on Journey to the West with sculpture of the Monkey King, and the giant golden thermometer, where visitors queue to photograph the ground temperature reading. The mountains themselves cannot be walked on in any meaningful way; the visit is a viewpoint.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- This is a twenty-minute photo stop, not a destination, and the ticketed plaza adds little to what you see from the road. Treat it as one item in a Turpan circuit with Jiaohe, Gaochang and Bezeklik.
- Bezeklik, in the gorge below the cliffs, is the substantial thing in this landscape: Buddhist cave temples from the fifth to ninth centuries. Much of the painting was cut out and removed to foreign collections in the early twentieth century, and the caves are consequently bare in places, which is itself worth seeing and explains the Urumqi museum's holdings.
- The thermometer is reading ground surface temperature, not air temperature, which is why it shows numbers in the sixties. The air is merely very hot.
- Midday light flattens the colour. The slopes read reddest in the early morning and the last hour of sun, which is also the only time standing outside is reasonable.
- Do not underestimate the heat. There is no shade, the rock radiates, and the plaza surfaces are too hot to sit on. Carry water and limit the time outside the car in July and August.
- The underground exhibition is air-conditioned, which in Turpan in summer is a genuine reason to go in.
When to come
Early morning or the hour before sunset, in April to early June or September to October, when the colour is strongest and standing outside is tolerable. July and August are extreme.
Getting around
The roadside and plaza viewing areas are paved and level and reachable by vehicle, so a wheelchair user can see the mountains and the thermometer without difficulty, and the underground exhibition is usually reached by ramp or lift. There is no accessible route onto the mountains themselves, and Bezeklik involves a steep stepped descent into the gorge and stepped cave entrances that are not accessible. A bad knee is fine at the viewpoint.
Worth knowing before you go
The spectacle is the colour, which needs late-afternoon light. At midday in summer you are paying to stand in an oven for a flat photograph.
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