The Qitai County also known as Gucheng (古城), is a county in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

 and is under the administration of the Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture

Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture

Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture ) is an autonomous prefecture of Xinjiang in the People's Republic of China. It is located in the northeastern part of Xinjiang...

. It contains an area of 16,641 km². According to the 2002 census, it has a population of 230,000.

History

Located on one of the main routes of the Silk Road

Silk Road

The Silk Road or Silk Route refers to a historical network of interlinking trade routes across the Afro-Eurasian landmass that connected East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean and European world, as well as parts of North and East Africa...

, the old Gucheng (often referred in the European writing of the past as "Ku Ch'eng-tze" etc., using Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles

Wade–Giles , sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a romanization system for the Mandarin Chinese language. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century , and was given completed form with Herbert Giles' Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.Wade–Giles was the most...

 or Postal Romanization systems), was the western terminal for one of the caravan

Caravan (travellers)

A caravan is a group of people traveling together, often on a trade expedition. Caravans were used mainly in desert areas and throughout the Silk Road, where traveling in groups aided in defence against bandits as well as helped to improve economies of scale in trade.In historical times, caravans...

 routes across the Gobi Desert

Gobi Desert

The Gobi is a large desert region in Asia. It covers parts of northern and northwestern China, and of southern Mongolia. The desert basins of the Gobi are bounded by the Altai Mountains and the grasslands and steppes of Mongolia on the north, by the Hexi Corridor and Tibetan Plateau to the...

. Owen Lattimore

Owen Lattimore

Owen Lattimore was an American author, educator, and influential scholar of Central Asia, especially Mongolia. In the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1938 to 1963...

in The Desert Road to Turkestan leaves an account of his travel along this route in 1926-27.