The government of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has decided to bring new life to Lop Nur and regard the decision as part of its efforts to be made for western region development. To this end, Xinjiang will dig tunnels through Tianshan Mountains to divert water from the Ili River to the Tarim River.
Lop Nur became reputed thanks to the book, “Migration Lake”, written by Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, but now it has become a stretch of desert.
Lop Nur was once richly supplied with bountiful water brought by floods and river course changes, but gradually dried up in the 1960s, with its water surface further reduced to nothing in 1972.
Since 1949, throngs of immigrants have swarmed to the 2300-meter Tarim River Valley for reclamation. They built more than 200 dykes for farmland irrigation, at an annual water consumption of over 6 billion cubic meters, as a result, the annual water volume on the downstream of the Tarim River has dropped to 2 billion cubic meters. After the Daxihaizi Reservoir was constructed in the 70s, the 300-km river course between the reservoir and the Taitema Lake dried up entirely, and large areas of the poplar trees along the Tarim River Valley had withered away.
The huge project, named “diverting water from north to south”, is aimed to restore water to the 240-km dried-up river beds in Lop Nur.
(People’s Daily 01/20/2001)
