A river that had to be built

Karamay means “black oil” in Uyghur, and it is the only city named after petroleum. It sits on the north-western edge of the Junggar Basin, fifteen kilometres from the Gurbantunggut Desert, with gravel and desert on every side. The local figures are blunt: under 130 millimetres of rain a year, and more than 3,500 millimetres of evaporation.

The first decades were organised around water. Trucks and camels went forty kilometres to reed ponds; households were rationed; the source records that about twenty people died on the roads of water search and diversion. Oil came first, but the city could not grow without water.

In the spring of 1997 work began on the largest water project the region had built, a diversion from more than four hundred kilometres away. Three years and more than thirty thousand workers later the water arrived. On 8 August 2000 it came over the Nine Dragons Pool, an eight-metre artificial fall, and ran along an 8.5-kilometre channel cut through the centre of the city.

That channel is the Karamay River: artificial, engineered, and now the line the city is organised around. Dragon-boat races are held on it. Calling it a river is a convention, not a geographical claim.

Green cover was 1 per cent in 1979 and 21.6 per cent in 1999; by 2023 the city reports 44 per cent, with fifteen square metres of public green space per person and 342 days of good air. A shelterbelt of some three million trees was planted between the city and the desert, and in 2022 the city added 55 pocket parks to its 22 larger ones.

These are the city’s own figures, published in its own campaign literature, and the language around them — “miracle”, “reverse” — is the source’s, not this article’s. What the numbers describe is real enough: a dry basin where the shade is engineered, and where a river had to be built before there could be a garden.