Jiaohe, Turpan, China

Another 24h bus ride took me across the border from Almaty into the autonomous Uygur region Xinjiang. Several superficial police controls later I arrived in Turpan, an important stop along the historical silk road. 

Jiaohe is a more than 2000 year old ruined city, a few km outside of Turpan. It was built on a 30 meter high natural plateau with steep cliffs between two rivers. 

The layout of the small city with its cliffs as boundaries instead of city walls is intriguing: sculpted out of and into the clay-rich soil, it seems antithetical to most citys, that are based an additive processes. The limitation to a single material makes it indistinguishable where additive and were subtractive methods where used, but also where the geological landscape ends and the man-made city starts. The sharp edge, a clear axis that connected different buddhist monasteries and stupas, a parallel main road through the residential quarter and a terrassed topography, with the most important monasteries placed at its highest plateau, together with the homogenous materiality makes for a clear structure. It is filled with smaller, organic alleyways that seem more like canyons cut into the soil then roads.