"Turfan: One of the town's earliest names, Huozhou ('Land of Fire') was derived from the intense summer temperatures, over 40 degrees C (or 104 F) between June and August. Yet another appellation, 'Storehouse of Wind' refers to the blustering winds that often whip through the town for several hours in the afternoons.
The winters here are also extreme, -10 degrees to -15 degrees C (14 degrees to 5 degrees F). Turpan is principally an agricultural oasis, famed for its grape products-- seedless white raisins and wines (mostly sweet). It is located in a depression, some 80 meters (260 feet) below sea level, and the climate is extremely dry. Nearby Moon Lake, at 154 meters (505 feet) below sea level is the second lowest point in the world after the Dead Sea." Odyssey Guide to Silk Road.
You really have to look at the map, but from Khotan (NHK Part 5), the NHK team actually turned back East and traveled over the entire length of the road through which they had already traveled after passing the Jade Gate (NHK Part 1). They were, of course, at last headed for the Northern Route of the Silk Road-- to Turfan, which is the main Oasis Town on the Northern Road.
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For the past two and a half years, I have been working on a documentary video translation project called The Great China (Yes, I did recommend that they think about changing the title!) The job has been a true pleasure as the videos themselves are beautifully filmed-- and the Japanese narration superb (which makes for a problem when trying to render the poetic Japanese into more standard documentary-style English).
JAL was the one to contract the English translations as they use them as part of their in-flight entertainment-- especially on flights in and out of China (Though I saw the one I did on Tibet flying into LA last summer). The video on the ruins found near Turfan, for some reason, particularly stands out in my mind. 
This is from my video narration translation:
The Tian Shan Mountain Range dominates the central part of China’s Uighur Autonomous Region. Pockets of snow-melt from these mountains produced moisture-rich areas in the desert. And, in these spots, great oasis states grew up, which were then linked together by the East-West trade routes of the ancient Silk Road. Little is known about the kingdoms and states that flourished 2,000 years ago along the fringes of the desert, as their long history has lain shrouded in the sands of the desert. To learn more, we travel the Northern Route of the Silk Road to the city of Turfan.
Turfan, we find out, is an ancient city with streets shaded by grape trellises and populated by Muslim Uighurs. The Uighurs, whose ancestors were Turkish nomads migrated to this area of the desert in the middle of 9th century. At that time, Turfan already had a history of over 1,000 years. There were two flourishing city-states out here in this part of the desert. The Great China documentary first travels to Jiaohe-- which was the first of the two kingdoms to perish.
Located to the west of the city are the ruins of Jiaohe City. This ancient city was established on the cliffs, which are some 30 meters high. Jiaohe City was the capital city of the State of Cheshi, a state formed by a Persian people during the early Han dynasty, over 2,000 years ago.
The ancient city located on this bluff functioned as a fortress in times of war, as the state of Cheshi had long been threatened by the Xiongnu, a nomadic tribe of the Steppe.
The NHK video actually shows what was a town literally sculpted out of the rocks. Flying over the area in a helicopter, the NHK team films a great bluff located between two rivers. 1600 meters in length and 300 meters across, the bluff has very steep cliff walls, which act as a natural fortress. 7000 people were said to live within the natural walls of the city, which was carefully planned in Chinese fashion along a north-south axis (with the palace and temples in the north, the official buildings in the center and the commoners in the south).
A veritable city of sculpture, this type of city-building is rare in the world. The ruins of people’s homes give a glimpse of what life was like. For example, these holes in the wall were for shelves to place things, and this place where the walls have turned brown was where the kitchen was located. There also remains the ruins of a well that was dug deep underground.
In the NHK video we are led around the ruins by Chinese-Japanese interpretor, novelist and researcher Chun Shun Shin. He shows us the temple ruins that he supposes Xuanzong preached in and then sadly informs us that by the time Xuanzong passed through these parts again 15 years later on his return from India, the Kingdoms were already long gone. From The Great China (my trans):
Cheshi was not only under the constant attack of the horse-riding nomads of the Steppe, but they also were being squeezed in by the Chinese, who were expanding their empire West. Finally when the Han-controlled Kingdom of Gaochang was established nearby during the 5th century, the State of Cheshi was incorporated into the Kingdom of Gaochang.
The ruins of Gaochang, which are located to the east of the city of Turfan, are some 5 kilometers in circumference. The largest ruins of the Silk Road, they show us something of the kingdom’s great prosperity. Although the Kingdom was ruled by a Han king, it was a state of many different peoples, including Persians, and the country had two official languages: Chinese and Persian.
The King of Gaochang was a devout Buddhist.
In 629, the King welcomed a young monk from China, the famous Xuanzang, who was on his way to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures for study. The King gave him a friendly reception, and it was said that some 300 monks gathered to hear a lecture he gave in the city.
This was the place where as I wrote about before (Pearls of the Taklamakan)
So intent was the devout Buddhist King of the Kingdom of Gaochang to keep the pilgrim there that the King tried to hold him there hostage. Rather than from any ill-will, the King quite simply could not bear to let such a stimulating conversationalist and brilliant debater leave his realm.
You can hardly blame him, actually.
From here it was only a few hours walk to the Flaming Mountains and the legendary caves at Bezeklik. Shun takes us into the caves and shows us how little remains today. The Muslim Turks had gashed out all the eyes of any figures that they found-- and I was stunned at how brutally it had been done with huge gashes dug out of the mountain. Then he walked over to entire panels of wall paintings that had been literally peeled away by the German team. He said, "It feels like someone ripped off a person's skin. Looking at all the damage, my heart hurts."
You just cannot help but marvel at the human condition! Like the ancient Greek gods, just as we create, so do we violently destroy.
Again, from my Great China video narration:
During the 7th century, Gaochang, a culturally vibrant and wealthy state, was overthrown by the Tang dynasty. Then in the early 10th century the Tang dynasty itself was overthrown. A new people swept in to fill the power vacuum: this time Uighur nomads who had been pushed out from the Mongolian Steppe.
The Uighurs absorbed many of the cultural practices of the existing peoples with their own and through inter-marrying came to become true people of the oasis.
It was in this way that the Silk Road oases become Turkified and Islamicized. Of the original inhabitants (the Persian Caucasians of which I have been writing about), it's impossible to say what became of them. But from the mid 9th century onward, the entire area has been home to the Muslim Uigurs and to this day, the area is known for its vibrant mosques and bazaars, its legendary grapes and sweet wines-- as well as Persian-style music and dancing.
It's also known for its mummies.
I want to say that the Mummies of Urumchi, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (another book that I have greedily been saving to open like a fine bottle of wine for years) took me by surprise. It would have, had I not read the remarkably good reviews. I have to say, I agree. It is the best book-- on an unlikely subject-- I have read in a long time. It is written with all kinds of charmingly old-fashion expressions and is full of mystery. In fact, it is written kind of like a whodunit mystery novel.
Who were these people, and why are they dressed in clothes so similar to famed kilts of the Celtic Irish that the similarities quite simply cannot be attributed to chance?
And the mummies themselves. They are incredible. Unlike the Egyptian ones you see that were elaborately prepared with chemicals and ointments, the Tarim mummies occurred naturally in their salt bed graveyards. This is why they are so life-like.
As Barber, who is a professor of archeology and linguistics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, points out, more than anything, it is their clothing that fascinates. Textiles this old, quite simply do not last that long. As the author comments, "Outside of Egypt, you find a presentable piece of cloth in a prehistoric dig about as often as you find a ruby in your oatmeal."
Her writing is actually like a tapestry itself as she weaves in stories of ancient peoples around the world, with explanations of dating techniques (from carbon dating to tree-ring dating), she then takes a very unusual (for a US scientist) approach: like a detective, she invokes deduction to present a story of who these people were, where they came from and where they went. This is from one online review:
Her argument proceeds where it leads, which on occasion might be graphically represented by a drawing of the Meander River in Turkey. The eddies and still pools along the way are as seductive as the channel. Tracing the advance of languages, for example, she travels from place names in Chinese Turkistan to the borrowings of American settlers from the Indians, as in Allegheny, Adirondack, and many others. "When wave after wave of new people passes through," she writes, "each group speaking a different language, the layers of old language accumulate like lines of seaweed on the sand behind the tide." Thus, while Athenai has been the Greeks' name for their principal city for 3,500 years, it belongs to earlier non-Greek inhabitants, as do the names of the local mountains Hymettus and Lycabetus, which can be traced to the Minoans. Then it's back to Turkistan, where most of the place names are Turkic, not Chinese.
I am not going to spoil the story. But the intricate connections that existed between peoples in ancient times-- not to mention the vast migration distances involved-- is truly thought-provoking (cf., Hattori's Letters from the Silk Road)
Here is a NYTimes Book Review on Barber's book by none other than my man Bernstein himself.
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