History
Located on one of the main routes of the Silk Road, the old Gucheng (often referred in the European writing of the past as "Ku Ch'eng-tze", Kucheng, Kuchengtze, etc., using Wade-Giles or Postal Romanization systems), was the western terminal for one of the caravan routes across the Gobi Desert."Under the special circumstances of the caravan trade, camel traffic usually overshootsHami Hami (Kumul) is a prefecture-level city in Eastern Xinjiang, China. It is well known as the home of sweet Hami melons. In early 2016, the former Hami county-level city was merged with Hami Prefecture to form the Hami prefecture-level city with t ...the most easterly point on the arterial cart roads of Chinese Turkestan” going on all the way to Ku Ch’eng-tze. This is partly because the pastures near Ku Ch’eng-tze are more adequate to caravan needs, but still more because, transport being cheaper by camel than by cart, it is to the advantage of merchants to have their goods carried as far as possible by caravan."
Climate
Transportation
In 2009, the Ürümqi–Dzungaria Railway was constructed through the Jiangjun Gobi desert in the northern part of the county. It terminates at a coal mine in Jiangjunmiao.(ChineseThe radio telescope project
In 2012, the officials of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Xinjiang government presided over the groundbreaking at the site of the Xinjiang Qitai Astronomical and Science Education Base. The facility, in Qitai County's Banjiegou Town ( 半截沟镇), will be the home of the proposed Qitai Radio Telescope. Once completed it will be the largest fully steerable single-dish radio telescope in the world.Footnotes
References
* Lattimore, Owen (1929). ''The Desert Road to Turkestan''. Owen Lattimore. Boston, Little, Brown, and Company. Reprinted with new introduction, 1972, AMS Press, New York, N.Y. {{authority control County-level divisions of Xinjiang Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture