Dreaming of Ili · 8 Days

Big Plate Chicken is the first calling card of Xinjiang cuisine and a must-order dish when locals gather. Chunks of chicken and potato turn in a bright red broth, dried chillies giving it a distinctive fragrance and colour, the chicken braised until tender and the potato dense and sweet with absorbed sauce. But anyone who really knows how to eat it knows the final addition of chewy belt noodles is the essence: broad handmade noodles laid in the base of the plate, soaked in rich sauce, taste better than the meat. In restaurants in Urumqi or Yining a plate feeds two or three, and with a chilled Wusu beer it is the most authentic Xinjiang way.

Dushanzi Grand Canyon sits at the start of the Duku Highway, a geological painting carved over hundreds of millions of years by Tianshan meltwater and the Kuitun River, known as the Grand Canyon of the East. The canyon walls form nine terraces in layers, bands of black, grey and yellow cut as if by axe, with a maximum vertical drop of two hundred metres — an extreme visual impact from the rim.

The Sayram Lake ring road runs about ninety kilometres. Self-driving is strongly recommended: enter at the east gate and exit at the south, clockwise, which puts the lake on your right the whole way so you can stop for photographs whenever you like. The route passes more than ten photogenic spots including Moon Bay, Dianjiang Platform, West Sea Grassland and Swan Lake Water, and at least a full day is recommended — sunrise in the early morning, wildflowers in the afternoon, sunset in the evening.

Qiongkushitai lies in Kaladala Town, Tekes County, Ili, Xinjiang; in Kazakh the name means big platform. About ninety kilometres from Tekes town at roughly 2,000 metres elevation, it is ringed by mountains on three sides, with grassland, river, snow mountains, forest, pasture and stream valley all in view — known as the Switzerland of the East and praised by Chinese National Geography as the last pure land of Tianshan. There are no walls and no tickets; what visitors see on entering the village is not only forest, pasture and stream but the everyday life of herders. It is precisely this difficulty of access and lack of commercialisation that has preserved its pristine soul. At 2,200 metres the sky pasture is one of the world's four great alpine river-valley grasslands. Nalati in Kazakh means the place that sees the sun first, and the sky grassland is its core and most celebrated route at about 2,200 metres. The terrain rolls gently and the grassland is vast, with the permanently snow-capped Tianshan range beyond and emerald meadow underfoot, creating a strong contrast of warm and cold in a single frame. Nalati is one of the world's four great alpine river-valley grasslands, presenting a vertical band from river-valley grassland through snow-ridge spruce and alpine meadow to snow mountain and glacier, and the sky pasture sits in the upper middle of that band — the most direct place to understand Nalati's three-dimensional grassland.

Tangbula comes from Kazakh, meaning seal or imprint, named because the rock on the ridge resembles an imperial seal. The scenic area covers 514,000 mu with 113 distinctive valleys, combining forest, grassland, snow mountains and hot springs, praised as a hundred-li scroll and natural gallery. The scenery here does not rely on a single highlight — the whole river valley is a continuous scroll unfolding before you: an open valley with snow mountains in the first stretch, meadow, spruce and wildflowers layer upon layer in the middle, farmland and pasture interleaved in the west, each section with its own character.