The Taklamakan desert is one of the loneliest places on earth, an empty space in China's wild west province of Xinjiang.
Protected by soaring mountain ranges on three sides and cut off from the east by the black pebbles of the Gobi, it has been shunned for centuries because of its evil reputation - the fearful "karaburan," or spring sandstorm which turns the sky black, and temperatures that swing from over 120 degrees in summer to far below zero in winter.Now China is determined to exploit its newest dominion and last frontier.
Hitherto treated as a military buffer zone against Soviet power, a test site for nuclear weapons and a dumping ground for political opponents - the equivalent of Russia's Siberia - Xinjiang has been caught up in the hectic economic development which some forecasters say will make China the dominant economy of the next century.
But development has its price. Not only is it expensive to build roads and railways over terrible terrain, but the native population is becoming angry.
In China's wild west, the indigenous Uighurs - Muslim people of Turkic descent and Caucasian appearance - inhabited the oasis towns and villages around the desert's edge long before the Manchu armies arrived in the 18th century.
The Uighurs complain of economic apartheid. They say the benefits of progress are going largely to the immigrant Chinese, the profits of agricultural and mineral exploitation are appropriated by Beijing and their culture and rights stripped from them.
"We feel completely powerless," said a young Uighur in Urumqi, the provincial capital.
Although determined to push ahead, the Chinese are unsure of the real extent of Xinjiang's hidden wealth. Wang Tao-wang, president of the China National Petroleum Corp., two years ago described the Tarim Basin in which the Taklamakan lies as "another Middle East."
But two auctions of drilling rights to foreign oil companies flopped and a third round is thought by Western experts to have gone no better. Although Wang has been forced to revise his estimates, foreign companies are reluctant to pull out altogether in case the wind changes in their favor.
Most of the Tarim Basin wells are located on the northern edge of the desert, where the town of Korla is being developed as the principal refinery and transport terminus. But six-wheeler trucks continue to plunge into the desert, defying the dreadful conditions.
Now there are oil derricks in the very heart of the desert, pumping from a new field called Tazhong, 300 miles from Korla. The prospectors' mobile dormitories can be seen in forlorn huddles at the furthest reaches of rivers fitfully fed by the glaciers of the Kunlun mountains to the south.
The most impressive example of China's determination to conquer the wilderness is the desert road now being completed from Luntai in the north to Minfeng (formerly Niya) in the south, slicing the Taklamakan in half. A roadway has been blasted through 210 miles of mountainous dunes; Alpine snow-prevention technology has been adapted to keep the fine sand at bay.
The road is inhabited along its length by imported laborers - possibly prisoners - who sweep the surface and maintain the artificial barriers on either side.
The desert highway will bring economic progress - not to mention greater political control - to the undeveloped southern oases where Uighurs are still greatly in the majority.
On this ancient route, part of the Silk Road which joined imperial Xian to imperial Rome, whole caravans used to disappear in the desert storms. Conditions are still bad: dust as fine as talcum powder hangs in the air like a fog, reducing visibility to a few yards. And when the wind blows off the mountains, life grinds to a halt.
These southern towns are already feeling the cultural impact of modern China. In Ruoqiang (ancient Charklik) is a bright new bus station built in the gaudy architectural style currently in favor, and nearby a camel stable has been converted into a lock-up garage.
The modern world in Xinjiang is only one brick thick. Town centers have been given a Chinese veneer - white tiles and tinted glass in shocking colors are popular - and the rows of mud-brick shops and dwellings are being replaced.
Life is more sophisticated and hectic on the northern side. There the road is real asphalt and crowded with motorcycles, taxis and private cars ferrying Communist Party officials and military bigwigs to interminable meetings. Trucks carrying coal, gas or cabbages drive in endless convoy east and north through the precipitous Tienshan mountains to Urumqi.
Officials describe in glowing terms how the old Eurasian trade route is being recreated by road and rail to connect distant Rotterdam with almost equally distant Beijing.
The provincial capital itself is unrecognizable from the colonial outpost of 10 years ago. Skyscrapers of fantastic design have sprouted up in the center, the roads are choked with traffic and the pollution is dense enough to rival that of any eastern Chinese metropolis.
But fear lurks beneath the surface of this brash material progress. For outside their enclaves in cities such as Urumqi, the Chinese go in dread of a native population which regards them as a hostile, occupying army.
It's plain how the wealth is divided. The Chinese run the large enterprises, fill the government offices and occupy the city apartments. They speed about in foreign cars, leaning arrogantly on the horn as they brush past the Uighur traders and peasant farmers on their plodding donkey carts.
Uighurs are permitted to learn their own language at elementary school. But even if they acquire fluency in Chinese, it's usually not enough to overcome the racial obstacle to promotion or well-paid government jobs, according to a Beijing-educated graduate who has chosen voluntary exile. Some city parents try to compensate by sending their children to Chinese schools.
Uighur couples are also permitted two children under China's one-child policy, but this is no help to a younger generation depressed by lack of opportunities. Drink, drugs and prostitution are now a serious problem among young Uighurs in Urumqi.
They are increasingly demoralized, said Dilmurat Abbas, whose family left for Australia some years ago. "When we left, our friends said we were crazy," he said. "Now they want to get out, too. Even my cousin, who has a job in a bank, wants to leave."
Racial tensions have increased as the economy prospers. Before anniversary celebrations in the capital in October, precautions were taken against "minority groups," which the Chinese routinely accuse of "threatening the unity of the motherland."
Political demonstrations in Xinjiang are rarely reported in the Chinese press, and almost never in the West. But there is anecdotal evidence of recent incidents in Kashgar, Khotan and Kucha.
One of the most serious documented uprisings occurred five years ago in the village of Baren, near Kashgar. Police, troops and helicopter gunships were sent in to quieten about 2,000 villagers protesting over the closure of a local mosque. According to Amnesty International, up to 50 people may have been shot by security forces and hundreds arrested all over the province.
Although under Chinese control for most of the past 200 years, Xinjiang wasn't colonized by the Chinese until after the Communist takeover in 1949.
Then the Communists disarmed large numbers of Nationalist troops stationed in the province and put them into camps to become what is today known as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military labor force numbering more than 2.2 million, according to Harry Wu, the Chinese-American human rights campaigner who spent 19 years in the camps for "wrong thinking."
From the late 1950s, thousands of convicts, political detainees and families labeled as counter-revolutionaries were brought from the east and forcibly settled in the province, an internal exile from which there is still usually no return.
As a result, the number of Han Chinese in the province's population of 15 million rose from an estimated 3 percent in 1947 to 38 percent today - more if the army is included.
So numerous are the prison camps and ex-prisoner settlements in this part of China that the authorities find it difficult to conceal them from Western eyes. The camps are sprawling settlements of concrete barracks, churned mud and scraggy cultivation.
The labor camps, or "laogai," are attracting high-level scrutiny, too. The World Bank recently announced the results of an investigation into claims by Wu that an irrigation project it was financing in the western Tarim Basin would benefit camps in the area and encourage the use of forced labour. The bank denied the money was being misappropriated and said it would benefit "half a million very poor people," most of them Uighurs.
As the western wilderness opens up, Chinese immigration into Xinjiang is more likely to be voluntary than forced. Opportunists are moving in to pursue the lure of oil, coal, cotton and gold. Western backpackers are becoming a common sight in Kashgar and along the northern road.
So the Chinese leadership faces a dilemma as it opens Xinjiang Province to the world: Driven by a thirst for oil and a hunger for tourist dollars, they can no longer afford to keep secret their western wilderness - or the political and judicial regime they are enforcing there.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)