Vientiane: As a child, my dream was to escape Makit and distance myself from the Taklimakan Desert,” recalled Reyhan Ehmet. Born in 2001 in Makit county, Kashgar prefecture in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Reyhan remembers a childhood dominated by sandy landscapes. “Spring rarely brought greenery-instead, everything indoors and outdoors was shrouded in a yellow haze, with the acrid taste of sand lingering in the air,” she added.
According to Lao News Agency, Makit county, surrounded by the Taklimakan Desert on three sides, spans an area where 90% of its land is desert. After graduating from university, Reyhan worked in Ningbo, east China’s Zhejiang Province. In February 2024, she returned to her hometown and was stunned by its transformation, prompting her to settle there permanently.
“Coming back, I now realize that we can manage, develop, and make good use of the Taklimakan Desert,” she said. Along the road from the county seat into the desert, a vast greenbelt of thriving trees extends for dozens of kilometers. This constitutes part of a 3,046-kilometer sand-blocking barrier encircling the Taklimakan, which Makit county has cultivated as its primary ecological defense system.
Since 2012, over 3 million residents have participated in Makit’s desertification control initiatives, resulting in the creation of 1.176 million mu (approximately 78,400 hectares) of desert reclamation projects, including 460,000 mu of shelterbelt forests. To date, more than 260 million trees have been planted, including diversiform-leaved poplars, Xanthoceras sorbifolium, Euphrates poplars, Russian olives, tamarisks, and saxauls.
“The Taklimakan Desert I see today is unrecognizable from the desert of my childhood,” Reyhan said. The shift extends beyond environmental recovery to a broader cultural shift in how locals perceive development, prioritizing sustainability over exploitation.