Tuyoq sits where a river has cut a gorge through the western end of the Flaming Mountains, about an hour east of Turpan in Shanshan county. It is usually described as one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in the Turpan basin, and it looks it: houses of mud brick built into the slope on both sides of the stream, lanes too narrow for a car, vine trellises over the paths, and the dark mouths of old drying sheds on the hillside above. The setting - bare red ridges with a green thread of water and trees running through them - is what people remember.
Grapes and the drying houses
Turpan is China's raisin country, and the seedless white grape grown here is the reason. The village is surrounded by vineyards, and the crop is dried in chunche, the tall brick sheds with slotted walls that stand on the edge of every settlement in the basin. The design lets the hot, dry wind through while keeping the sun off the fruit, so the grapes dry into green raisins in a few weeks rather than shrivelling or fermenting. In late summer the flat roofs and the yards are loaded with trays of grapes and the air smells of them.
The shrine and the caves
Above and behind the village there is a mazar, a pilgrimage site associated with a legend of sleepers who sheltered in a cave, which is why the place is also called the Mazar village and why it draws visitors from across the region. Nearby, cut into the far wall of the same gorge, is the Tuyoq cave temple, a set of Buddhist grottoes painted between about the fifth and the eighth centuries and damaged over the centuries. Access to the caves varies with conservation work, so ask locally before planning around them.
Practical notes
The village is reached by road from Turpan, and it is normally combined with the Flaming Mountains viewpoint and the county town of Shanshan. Summer heat here is genuinely extreme - the basin is one of the hottest places in China, with July daytime temperatures well above forty degrees - so the village is best visited in the cooler months or early in the morning. Dress modestly out of respect for the people who live there and for the shrine, and buy your grapes and raisins from the village shops rather than from a coach stop.
