THE decision having been reached to send me to Sinkiang, the question arose as to how I was to get there. Urumchi can be reached from three directions ; from Kashmir in India across the Himalaya, Karakoram and Pamir to Kashgar, and thence a further journey of near a thousand miles through Eastern Turkistan to Urumchi ; from China across the Gobi desert to Hami and thence on across the T'ien Shan range to Urumchi ; and via the Trans-Siberian and Turkistan-Siberian railways through Russian Central Asia to the Chinese frontier town of Chuguchak (Ta-ch'eng) and thence by cart or motor truck across the Dzungarian steppe to Urumchi.
Chinese dignitaries traveled with us from place to place, and when ready to depart from Urumchi, or Tihwa, we were introduced to the high officials who were going along in the plane.
Pending the completion of the Sinkiang railroad, the region is served by a number of major land routes that have been transportation links since ancient times. They are the North Road (north of the Tien Shan) passing from Kansu through Urumchi and Wusu, where it bifurcates into two routes going to the Soviet Union.
1962, W. A. Douglas Jackson, “Sino-Soviet Relations and the Communist Revolution”, in The Russo-Chinese Borderlands: Zone of Peaceful Contact or Potential Conflict?[4], 2nd edition, D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., published 1968, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 91:
By mid-1960 track had been laid to within 200 miles of Urumchi; but by mid-1961 it remained uncompleted, possibly because of a lack of steel for rails. From Urumchi, it was planned to extend the line westward past the oilfields at Tushantzu, into the Dzhungarian Gate.
1968, Victor C. Funnell, “Social Stratification”, in Problems of Communism[5], volume 17, number 2, page 18:
Where applicable, local cost-of-living allowances and inducement or "hardship" payments have generally been in effect, and so-called "frontier allowances" have been paid in the more remote provinces (in 1955, for example, in Urumchi, the allowance was 15 percent of the regular wage).
Now a survey of the section from Urumchi to the Ala Shan Pass, on the Soviet border, has been finished, and the roadbed has reached the northern side of the T’ien Shan [23].
Urumchi, Bishbalikh or Tihwa (towns in Sinkiang often have three or more names given them by the Turki Uighurs, Mongols, Hans or others) lies at the northern end of the main gap in the Tienshan between northern and southern Sinkiang, the Iron Gates (the Tieh Men Kuan or Dawencheng Pass).
When his pet dog carried a limp goose that had been hit by a car into the yard of his home in Urumchi, China, Yu Yanping thought the dog would eat it. Instead, the dog licked the bird until it recovered, and the two went on to become inseparable, feeding from the same bowl and even sharing the dog’s kennel.
