My job here at the desert's edge is to acquire some positional information that can be extrapolated out into the dunes. With the radar images thus geocoded, subsequent expeditions will be able to travel into the desert to uncover sand-buried cities that have been lost for a thousand years. My journey began in Khotan, once a flourishing and important city-state of the southern Silk Road. Khotan is rich with agricultural wealth generated by channeling two large rivers that flow down from the Kunlun Mountains. Like other oasis cities of the region, in Khotan they grow wheat, rice, corn, cotton, grapes, peaches, and melons.
Shepherds graze their flocks at the community's fringe.
Once Khotan was wealthy from Silk Road trade that passed through the city, but that was centuries ago, and today's regional economics hinges not on trade but on the oil reserves lying under the desert sands. No major petroleum deposits have been found near Khotan, and so the city is a backwater, little changed from my visit four years ago. It's still a reservoir of pure Uighur culture where courtyards are shaded by grape arbors, people are devout Muslims, and little Mandarin is heard. The changes confound my work, and I am constantly having to ask whether this road or that bridge is new since 1994 when the radar images were acquired. In Minfeng's shady suburbs, however, I found that the grid of long, straight avenues that define agricultural land-holdings is virtually unchanged.