Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Land
Mountains & Deserts
China has a largely mountainous and hilly topography, commencing in precipit-
ous fashion in the vast and sparsely populated Qinghai-Tibetan plateau in the
west and levelling out gradually towards the fertile, well-watered, populous and
wealthy provinces of eastern China.
Averaging 4500m above sea level, the Qinghai-Tibetan region's highest
peaks thrust up in the Himalayan mountain range along its southern rim,
where mountains average about 6000m above sea level, with 40 peaks rising
dizzyingly to 7000m or more. This vast high-altitude region (Tibet alone consti-
tutes one-eighth of China's landmass) is home to an astonishing 37,000 glaci-
ers, the third-largest mass of ice on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctic.
This mountain geology further corrugates the rest of China, continuously rip-
pling the land into spectacular mountain ranges.
China also contains extensive - and growing - desert regions that occupy
almost a fifth of the country's landmass, largely in its mighty northwest. These
are inhospitably sandy and rocky expanses where summers are torturously
hot and winters bone-numbingly cold. North towards Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz-
stan from the plateaus of Tibet and Qinghai lies Xinjiang's Tarim Basin, the
largest inland basin in the world. This is the location of the mercilessly thirsty
Taklamakan Desert - China's largest desert and the world's second largest
mass of sand after the Sahara Desert. China's most famous desert is of
course the Gobi, although most of it lies outside the country's borders.
East of Xinjiang extend the epic grasslands and steppes of Inner Mongolia -
China's largest production centre for mining rare earth metals and the nation's
chief coal-producing region - in a huge and elongated belt of land that
stretches to erstwhile Manchuria.
