Understand
Cherchen is a river oasis town along the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. It is the largest town east of Khotan in southern Xinjiang.
This area has a truly ancient human history, based on the 3,500-year-old cemetery along the ancient Jade Road that traded with the earliest Chinese dynasties and the similarly-dated Bronze Age rock carvings south of town along another ancient trade route to what is now Tibet and a forgotten back door to central China.
More than a thousand years later, the area was ruled as the kingdom of Calmadana during the earliest heyday of the Silk Road. Its fortunes have since ebbed and flowed, mainly with the popularity of the southern trade route: sometimes abandoned, as when Buddhist monk Xuan Zang passed through in the year 644, and other times bustling, as when Marco Polo came by in 1273.
Cherchen has a surprisingly large modern center, with wide paved streets, traffic lights, modern hotels, modern restaurants, a hospital, a large central square, a commercial airport, a supermarket, a computer store, Internet cafes, and several large apartment blocks.
Visitors can also explore pleasant rural, Uyghur residential neighborhoods, including a large district just across the street from center of town. There are rural pasturelands, with flocks of sheep, and agricultural fields to wander about a bit farther from the center. The Uyghur bazaar is small but interesting, and the traveler can pick up a game of pool at one of a dozen tables at the bazaar entrance.
Cherchen does not see many foreign visitors, though it has a lot to offer. More than 60,000 Chinese travelers visited in 2005, but only 448 foreign visitors.
This scarcity of foreign tourists may be due to the minimal tourist information previously available in English. These sparse blurbs mostly describe out-of-date information about poor roads and minimal transportation. Even recently-updated China guidebooks still, unfortunately, reprint the same tired, archaic lamentations.
Cherchen County spent ¥8 million in 2005 alone on tourist infrastructure such as roads and ¥2.5 million in 2005 on tourism sights, and tourism spending continues apace so access and support will continue to improve.
