The desert remembers everything. I didn't fully understand that until I arrived in my second stop in Xinjiang—Ruoqiang, a small county in China's far west that most outsiders would struggle to find on a map. But mention its ancient name—Loulan—and something shifts. The kingdom first appears in the pages of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, China's foundational work of history, written over two thousand years ago. Back then, Loulan sat at the northwestern edge of the known world, perched on the northern shore of Lop Nor and straddling the great artery of the Silk Road. Merchants from Rome, Persia, India, and China passed through its gates. It was a place where languages blurred and currencies changed hands, where the smell of spices mingled with camel dust. For centuries, it thrived. Then it was gone. Loulan disappeared in the fourth century, leaving behind sand, silence, and an unanswered question that would haunt scholars for the next millennium and a half. The world rediscovered Loulan almost by accident. In March 1900, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin was crossing the Taklamakan Desert when his Uyghur guide, Ordek, retraced his steps to recover a lost tool — and stumbled instead upon the ruins of an ancient city half-buried in the dunes. What Ordek had found was Loulan. The discovery set off more than a century of archaeological obsession for Loulan. But history had another layer waiting. After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, the Chinese government quietly established a nuclear test site near the ruins. On October 16, 1964, China's first atomic bomb detonated over the Lop Nor basin — not far from where Loulan's merchants had once haggled over silk and jade. The entire region was sealed as a classified military zone, off-limits to archaeologists and adventurers alike. The desert that had already swallowed one civilization was now guarding state secrets. Loulan, impossibly, became even more mysterious. The real shock came in the spring of 1980. A team led by Mu Shunying, the first woman archaeologist ever to enter the Lop Nor region, was excavating a burial site on the Tieben River delta when they uncovered something no one was prepared for: a remarkably well‑preserved female mummy that had slumbered beneath the desert sands for nearly 3,800 years. The press called her the Loulan Beauty. When a landmark documentary co-produced by CCTV and NHK brought her image to television screens across Asia and beyond, the reaction was something close to collective disbelief. Who was she? Where had her people come from? Why did they vanish? Nobody knows. And that curiosity, more than anything, is what pulled me across the desert to stand here.

Many people assume Xinjiang is synonymous with Islam. But standing at the edge of the desert in Hotan, gazing at ruins half-swallowed by sand, what came to my mind was the Buddha. Hotan — known in antiquity as Khotan — hugs the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, perched along the southern branch of the Silk Road. According to historical records, it is also the earliest region in Xinjiang where Buddhism took root. Around the 1st century BCE, Buddhism traveled eastward from Kashmir and first arrived in Khotan. Over the centuries that followed, Khotan, Kucha (present-day Kuqa), and Gaochang (present-day Turpan) grew into the three great centers of Buddhist civilization in the ancient Western Regions — and from these three nodes, the faith radiated outward across the entire region. Buddhism reached its zenith here in the 5th century CE. Historical records describe a landscape where "a stupa stood before every household." The renowned monk Xuanzang, the historical prototype of Tang Sanzang in Journey to the West, passed through this Buddhist kingdom during his pilgrimage to India. By the early 11th century, Khotan was conquered by the Kara-Khanid Khanate, marking the collapse of the Buddhist civilization that flourished for more than a thousand years. Today I visited the Rawak Temple Ruins. What stands above ground are the remaining foundations of a stupa complex. A staff member told me that beneath the surrounding sand lie many broken Buddha statues—their heads were taken by outsiders. The British Aurel Stein visited Rawak on two separate expeditions, in 1901 and again in 1906. He described the stupa as "by far the most imposing structure" he had seen in the Khotan region. The large clay Buddha figures were too heavy to transport whole, so he cut off the finest heads and carried those away, leaving the headless bodies to the desert. Modern Hotan is a city quietly holding its ground — planting trees against the encroaching dunes, sustaining an oasis on the margins of one of the world's harshest deserts. The Buddhist civilization that once flourished here is gone. But it was real — in the stupas, the statues, the manuscripts, the footsteps of Xuanzang. It shaped this land for a thousand years before it disappeared into the sand. That, too, is part of Xinjiang's story.

The world's largest and most sensitive single-dish radio telescope—the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), nicknamed "China Sky Eye" — has recently reached a key milestone: six domestically-made steel wire ropes, totaling nearly 4,000 meters in length and each tipping the scales at over 6 tons, are replacing the imported ones. Think of FAST as a colossal eye scanning the heavens, and the feed cabin is its "eyeball." Just as our eyes rely on six extraocular muscles working in concert to rotate smoothly and lock onto targets, FAST's 30-ton feed cabin is precisely steered and tracked across the telescope's massive reflective surface by six cable-driven steel wire ropes. Suspended 140 meters in the air, these six ropes work together to position the "eyeball" in real time across a 206-meter range. The demands on them are punishing: each rope endures hundreds of bending cycles and pulse loads every single day, requiring exceptional fatigue resistance — they must operate continuously for five years without failure to keep FAST running at peak performance. The independent R&D of these ropes started in January 2023. To test their performance, the research team ran sample ropes repeatedly 62,000 times on pulleys and conducted 200,000 pulse fatigue tests, with loads impacting cyclically between 120 kN and 400 kN. After 3 rounds of iterative experiments, the feed-driving steel wire ropes for FAST finally succeeded in August 2025. The replacement work is expected to last until late June.