LOCATION AND AREA

Directly under the jurisdiction of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and with its government seat 150 kilometers from Urumqi, the city if Shihezi is located on the riverside of the Manas on the northern foot of the Tianshan Mountains and covers an area of 460 aquare kilometers with an average elevation of 450.8 meters.

HISTORY

The legend has it that two hundred years ago, the Qing Dynasty government set up a small courier station here where camel trains, caravans and Qing troops could rest. In 1876, some troops of the Qing general Zuo Zongtang’s army stationed in the Mosuowan area north of Shihezi were buried by the vast sea of desert. Before liberation, there were only twenty households or so in the Shihezi area, which was then surrounded by the Gobi Desert. There was also a dried-up river with a graves covered bed, thus the name Shihezi (the Stone River). After liberation, the Farming and Reclamation Corps of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) started to reclaim the land here. In the last thirty years or so, a completely new city, Shihezi City, has been founded which has been eulogized as the “Bright Pearl in the Gobi Desert.”

PPOPULATION AND NATIONALITIES

Shihezi has a population of 550,000, with an urban population of 210,000 and a population of 330,000 in agricultural and husbandry farms. It has thirteen nationalities, with the Han majority making up 96.2 percent of the total population.

ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS

Directly under the jurisdiction of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Shihezi is the seat of the headquarters of the Eighth Division of the Production and Construction Corps of PLA.

CLIMATE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

ECONOMY

Shihezi is a newly founded city with a combination of farming, industry and commerce on the desert. It is a well-ordered, green city with flower gardens, wide streets and clustered buildings interspersed with lawns and green trees. The city has eighteen agricultural and livestock farms and 240 large, medium and small enterprises producing coal, cement, electric power, textile, sugar, food and machinery. It has 30,173 hectares of cultivated land, making up 65.6 percent of the total area of the city, and 8,860 hectares of forest, or 19.29 percent of the area. The distinction of “High-Quality Product” has been bestowed by the Autonomous Region on some of the industrial products of Shihezi, among them the 30g-per-square-meter glazed paper of the Shihezi Paper Mill, the edible alcohol distilled by the August LST Sugar Refinery, Hami melon juice and the powdered mild tea of the Shihezi Bakery and Confectionery Company, the pure woolens of the August LST Woolen Mill, White Snow Lily brand fine cloth from the August LST Cotton Mill, Tianshan brand gourmet powder, Nongken brand Hami melon candy, Camel Bell brand pure woolen overcoating, and Tianshan brand pure cotton yarn.

Following the principle of developing farming, forestry, animal husbandry, side-line occupations and fisheries in an all-round and balanced way, mainly using mechanized farming, Shihezi has been successfully growing wheat, corn, cotton, beet and other crops, with the beet output making up half of the total of the Autonomous Region and the cotton output one-seventh. With a brisk commerce, Shihezi has about 5,000 shops and service centers, averaging one for every sixty persons. Shihezi has good transportation connection: the Urmqi-Ili Highway and the Urumqi-Altay Highway pass through the city and the railway line to Urumqi is already finished.

SCIENCE, EDUCATION, CULTURE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

The city has seventy-seven film projection teams, two professional art organizations, ine cultural center, one library, one television station and a newly set up television tower 148 meters high. Within the Shihezi Reclamation Area there are fourteen television relay stations and twenty rediffusion stations.

The city has 143 public health organizations and five hospitals, with 4,700 hospital beds and 5,800 public health workers.

SCENIC SPOTS AND PLACES OF INTEREST

Five kilometers from the city center, the farm has reputation as “The Greenest Southern-Style Field North of the Great Wall.” Here on the farm each season sees a different landscape. In the sowing season, strips of transparent plastic cover the seeded fields to keep the soil wet and warm, looking like a minature Milky Way glittering under the bright sunshine. In summer and autumn, the place is decorated with waving golden wheat fields, silvery cotton fields and green corridors of lush trees. Visitors can savor grapes, melons and other fruit under the grape trellis while talking to the farm workers.

Fifty kilometers from the city center along a smooth highway, the farm is the birthplace of the Xinjiang fine-wool sheep and also the Hometown of the Chinese Merino. It is one of the important scientific centers for sheep breeding, grasslands and veterinary science. Located at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains, the farm has a resplendent landscape and a comfortable climate in summer. It is a charming stopover on the way to the Southern Mountains.