Karez Folk Culture Park 坎儿井民俗园

About Karez Folk Culture Park

The municipal page places the park at Xincheng Ximen village, Ya'er township, Turpan, at 89°08′33″E, 41°57′7″N, and records that it covers 14,680 sq m and was built in July 2000 with investment from a Sino-foreign joint venture, the Urumqi Chenye Mingpin company, with registered capital of 22 million yuan. Those ownership and investment details are a 2009 record and are reported as such. The park's operating items are an old karez, a karez museum, an ethnic song-and-dance restaurant, a guesthouse in traditional dwellings, a vineyard and a shop, making it a tourism area combining dining and lodging, ethnic performance, leisure holidays and sightseeing and shopping. In 2004 the National Tourism Administration rated it among the first batch of national agricultural tourism demonstration sites and a national 3A-grade scenic area.

The karez is listed alongside the Great Wall and the Grand Canal as one of China's three great ancient engineering works. The 2009 page describes it as a special irrigation system made up of vertical shafts, underground channels, open channels and a small storage pond, with the shafts serving for ventilation and for lifting earth during construction and repair, and the outlet of the underground channel joining the surface channel to bring groundwater from tens of metres down to the surface. A 2024 municipal media centre article describes the same system as made up of an underground channel, an open channel and a storage pond, generally 3–5 km long, and gives vertical shafts spaced every 20–70 m, with from a dozen to over a hundred shafts to a karez.

The two municipal sources disagree on how many karez survive and on how many parts the system has. The 2009 page says Xinjiang has about 1,600 karez, most numerous and concentrated in the Turpan basin at more than 1,200, with a total length of over 5,000 km, and gives four components; the 2024 article gives 1,108 karez in the Turpan area with a total channel length of about 5,000 km, and gives three. Neither figure is presented here as the current count. The catalogue places the park in Gaochang District, while the 2009 page gives its address as Ya'er township in Turpan; the record reports the page's own locality.

What to look for

• The old karez the park is built around, which the municipal page lists as one of its operating items.
• The karez museum inside the park, also among its operating items.
• The vertical shafts of a karez, which the sources describe as serving for ventilation and for lifting earth and as spaced every 20–70 m, with from a dozen to over a hundred to a single karez.

Location & getting there

Getting to Karez Folk Culture Park

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 坎儿井民俗园 with 吐鲁番市 and 高昌区.