| Day 1 Arrive in Urumqi, meet the local guide and transfer flight to Kashigar. Upon arrivel, meet the local guide and transfer to the hotel. |
( D ) Overnight in Kashigar MMMwww.Chinakindnesstour.com
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| Day 2 After breakfast visit the Mausoleum of Apark Hojia (a 17th century Muslim leader), walk through the old town quarter ending up at the Ldgah Mosque (the largest in China) and the surrounding market area (the street of craftsmen including musical instrument craftsmen, jewelers, goldsmiths, etc.). Visit Grand Kucha mosque ( with central Asian architectural style ). |
( B/L/D ) Overnight in Kashigar MMMwww.Chinakindnesstour.com
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| Day 3 Drive to Kucha ,on the way visit Kizil caves. One of the important centers along northern branch of the Silk Road in the Tarim Basin was Kucha, located at the intersection of the east-west trade route with one descending from the difficult Muzart Pass in the north. Kucha was one of the earliest centers of Buddhism in the Tarim Basin. Buddhism may have arrived there as early as the first century CE. The area’s flourishing Buddhist communities were noted in a fourth-century Chinese chronicle. Since the area was one where people of different ethnicities mixed, it became a center in which the activities of multi-lingual translators could flourish. One of the most famous and accomplished of the translators of Buddhist scriptures in China, Kumarajiva (344-413) was a Kuchean, born to Indian and Kuchean parents. The famous pilgrim monk Xuanzang in the 630s described Kucha at some length. |
(B/L/D) Overnight in Kucha MMMwww.Chinakindnesstour.com
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| Day 4 Visit Subash temple, the largest ruins of a Buddhist temple ever discovered in Xinjiang. Built of adobe in the third century, the temple is made of two parts that are located on both sides of the Kuche River. The eastern part of the temple is built on a mountain slope, inside which stand three pagodas. Climbing onto the tallest pagoda, one can get a bird’s-eye view of the whole temple complex. The western part of the temple is square in shape and is surrounded by ten-meter-high walls. It’s where the main buildings are located, such as the Buddha-worshipping halls, meditation halls and monks’dwellings. Kuqa Mosque, built in the Qing Dynasty,is located on a mound in the county seat of Kuqa. It consists of the Xuanli Minaret,a great hall, an unknown tomb, the scripture-learning hall, the religious court, etc., covering a large area. Take soft sleeper train to Urumqi. |
(B/L/D) Overnight on the train MMMwww.Chinakindnesstour.com
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| Day 5 Transfer to hotel ,visit Xinjiang Museum. The Museum features several fine exhibitions, among them a collection of mummies excavated throughout Xinjiang and spanning more than 3,000 years of history (the oldest being more than 5,000 years in age). Visit a Silk Road exhibition and a series of exhibitions on the minority cultures of Xinjiang. |
(B/L/D) Overnight in UrumqiMMMwww.Chinakindnesstour.com
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Day 6 Visit Heavenly Lake, situated in the Heavenly Mountain (Tianshan) range, 115 km (71 miles) northeast of Urumqi, Heavenly Lake (Tianchi Lake) is one of the main tourist attractions in China. Formerly known as Yaochi (Jade Lake), the lake is particularly refreshing for those arriving in Urumqi from the barren deserts in Xinjiang, or from China’s numerous granite cities. It is hemmed in by the majestic snow-crowned peaks west of Bogda Mountain and it is geologically a moraine lake 3,400 meters (1,1125 feet) long, 1,500 meters (4920 feet) wide, 1,980 meters (6494 feet) above sea level.MMMwww.Chinakindnesstour.com
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(B/L/D) Overnight in UrumqiMMMwww.Chinakindnesstour.com
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| Day 7 Drive to Turpan ( travel distance is approximately 180 kilometres; 2.5 hours' drive) . Arrive and first visit a traditional Uighur household including the family Karez ( the irrigation system that taps into the snowmelt from the Tian Shan Mountains). Visit ancient city of Jiao. |
| (B/L/D) Overnight in Turpan |
| Day 8 Morning drive east of Turfan into the Huoyan Shan (Flaming Mountains) and visit the Bezelik Buddhist Caves which although have lost many images and murals, remain fascinating for their distinctive style and design (reflective of the Uighur minority) – caves constructed between the 9th – 14th centuries during the zenith of the Uighur/Han rule over the kingdom of Uighurstan. visit Astana Tomb. Take soft sleeper train N950（2147/0841) to Dunhuang. |
| (B/L/D) Overnight on the Train |
| Day 9 From Liouyuan station drive to Dunhuang. Visit Mogao Grottoes, where travelers find it a shrine of Buddhist art treasures, 25km (15.5miles) from downtown Dunhuang on the eastern slope of Mingsha Shan (Mount Echoing Sand). A network of plank reinforced roads plying north to south 1600 meters (5, 249 feet), long leading to the cave openings, which are stacked five stories high, some reaching up to 50 meters (164 feet). By the way, Mogao means high up in the desert. According to Tang Dynasty records, a monk had witnessed onsite a vision of thousand Buddhas under showers of golden rays. Thus inspired, he started the caves construction work that spanned ten dynasties. Mogao Caves are commonly known as the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas. Buddhist art has its origins in India. Mogao sculptors improvised where the rock surface did not work well under their chisels. They placed clay statues in front of the cave walls, carved relief murals as backdrops, and painted the sidewalls and ceilings with art decors. The largest statue is 34.5 meters (113 feet) high and the smallest a mere 2 centimeters (0.79inches) high. |
| (B/L/D) Overnight in Dunhuang |
| Day 10 Visit Singing Dunes. "Singing dunes are one of the most puzzling and impressive natural phenomena I have ever encountered " says Andreotti,"The sounds produced can be heard up to 10 kilometers away and resemble a drum or a low-flying jet." The sounds can be as loud as 105 decibels and have frequencies between about 95 and 105 Hertz. The French physicist took his equipment from Paris to the Atlantic Sahara in Morocco, which contains more than 10,000 crescent shaped dunes known as barchans. The wind in the desert can erode the back of these dunes, causing sand to build up at the top of the dune. When too much sand has accumulated, an avalanche occurs and the dunes start to "sing". Andreotti simultaneously measured vibrations in the sand bed and acoustic emissions in the air, and then extracted information about the frequency, amplitude and the phase of these signals. He found that the vibrations in the sand behaved like slow-moving elastic sound waves that were localized at the surface of the dune and had an amplitude that was about a quarter of the diameter of an individual grain of sand. "The sounds result from avalanches in which the grains drum on one another, exciting elastic waves on the dune surface, with the vibration of the sand bed tending to synchronise the collisions," he told PhysicsWeb. "In many ways the surface of the sand bed acts like the membrane in a loudspeaker". |
| (B/L/D) Overnight in Dunhuang |
| Day 11 After breakfast take flight to exist. (B) |
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