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Karamay – Black Oil and More
A statue of old Salimu, Xinjiang’s first oil man.
-by Ernie Diaz
Analogies are long gone from the SAT, America’s college entrance test; the kids can’t wrap their heads around them anymore. See if you get this one:
America is to Alaska as China is to:
A. Harbin
B. Taiwan
C. Xinjiang
D. Inner Mongolia
E. Sarah palin
Congratulations if you chose C. You get partial credit if you answered D. But Xinjiang is more remote and fundamentally estranged from the Chinese soul. And Xinjiang has much more of that which makes the world go round. Nowhere more than in Karamay, whose name literally means “black oil”, where it bleeds from the very earth, first scooped up by enterprising old Salimu, who discovered its properties and made the first oil fortune peddling it. Here’s to the beauty of Karamay, and not the bounty.
The Kuitun River cliffs at the foot of Tianshan Mountain. Views like this quickly clear the head of any inflated notions regarding man and his mighty works.
The same cliffs in different light, demonstrating why they’re also known as a “Japanese Painting”.
Where on earth lays this rugged peace, the Wild West? Well, yes, you could say that….
Bubblin’ crude, no Jed Clampett necessary.
Oil tar hills leading up to Mt. Hala Alate. Karamay’s tectonics are so frisky that the black gold can’t even stay put in the substrata.
Forbidding to most, Karamay is nonetheless a geologist’s Disneyland, what with oil so easy to find, and far-out rockery at every turn, such as this pillow-shaped potassic feldspar.
Countertop makers, too, would no doubt love to get to Karamay, and valleys like this one, generously littered with solid granite boulders.
Want to survive long-term in Karamay? Stay small, stick together, and get used to being thirsty, like these colonies of bryophyte.
Or, conversely, be as unto the poplar diversifolia, with roots as strong as the earth itself. The Uyghurs aver that the poplar diverifolia lives a thousand years, stands another thousand after it dies, and does not rot for another thousand after it falls.
These willow trees won’t last nearly as long, but put on quite a show of color during their relatively brief tenure.
And, for a fleeting rainy season, flowering shrubs amidst the dunes – camel thorn and climbing groundsel.
What life there is shrinks in comparison to the vast lifelessness of the Gurban Tongut Desert.
A wonder then, and a tribute to man’s ingenuity, revealed in the Baiyanghe reservoir, that some 300,000 can call this dessicated place home.
Yes, more tenacious than even the poplar diversifolia, men will take it upon themselves to build rivers in the desert, the Karamay River, with its source here at the Ghost Castle Reservoir.
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