In Xinjiang, Tianchi Lake Holds the Silence

A Tianshan red deer lowers its head beneath the fir trees near Tianchi Lake, calmly chewing grass as tourists walk through the surrounding forest. Nearby, blue-green water stretches between the mountains, its still surface resembling a sheet of jade at the foot of the peaks.

Known in China as Heavenly Lake, Tianchi lies in the Bogda Mountain Valley of the Tianshan range, about 110 kilometers from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. The lake is in the administrative area of Fukang City, at an elevation of roughly 1,910 to 1,980 meters above sea level.

Xinjiang offers a landscape on a vast scale. The region covers 1.66 million square kilometers, almost one-sixth of China’s land area. Snow-covered mountains, hot deserts, grasslands, forests and lakes meet across its territory.

Its geography is shaped by three mountain systems and two major basins. The Altai Mountains and Junggar Basin lie to the north, where the Gurbantünggüt Desert forms China’s second-largest sandy desert. To the south, the Kunlun Mountains mark the border with the Tibetan Plateau, while the Tarim Basin contains the Taklamakan Desert, China’s largest sandy desert. The Tianshan range runs from west to east between them, dividing Xinjiang into northern and southern sections.

Tianchi itself is crescent-shaped, covering about 4.9 square kilometers and reaching approximately 105 meters at its deepest point. Yet the figures give way to a quieter image: a lake held within the mountains, with its name rooted in Chinese landscape and mythology for centuries. That calm exists alongside Xinjiang’s political tensions. International human rights organizations have repeatedly focused on the treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim communities, while Beijing firmly rejects the accusations. Uyghurs were Xinjiang’s largest ethnic group in the 2020 census, numbering 11.62 million, or about 44.96 percent of the region’s population.