Base de chevaux Awalachi du parc écologique antique du Xinjiang

The Xinjiang Ancient Ecological Park, including its Akhal-Teke horse base, is a themed park on Liyu Mountain in central Urumqi, Xinjiang, opened in 2005 and covering roughly twenty hectares. The site combines several loosely related collections under a single "Silk Road ecology and steppe culture" theme, and is one of the more unusual stops on a city itinerary.

The most distinctive component of the park is the Akhal-Teke horse base. The Akhal-Teke is a Central Asian breed famous for its metallic coat and endurance, and a herd is kept here for public viewing, with scheduled performances that demonstrate the horses' training and gait. The breed is closely associated with the steppe traditions of the region, and the base is paired with a small museum on the horse culture of the Tian Shan and the Silk Road, including saddlery, tackle, and historical material on the cavalry traditions of the region.

A second, unexpected collection at the park is devoted to silicified wood. Large trunks of petrified wood, recovered from deposits in the Junggar Basin and elsewhere in Xinjiang, are displayed in a garden setting along with stands of ancient Populus euphratica wood and a small group of iron meteorites. While the connection to horse culture is largely thematic, the specimens themselves are visually striking, and the silicified wood in particular includes some of the larger examples on public display in the region.

A third set of installations includes a collection of "grassland stone men," the early medieval memorial figures distributed across the Mongolian and Tian Shan steppe, together with a small number of Przewalski's horses, the wild horse subspecies once extirpated in the wild and now the subject of a regional reintroduction program in Xinjiang.

The park also includes a themed Silk Road hotel, restaurants, and craft shops. For international travelers the site is best understood as a layered popular introduction to several distinctive strands of regional natural and cultural history, rather than a focused museum. A visit typically takes about two hours and pairs well with a stop at the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Museum, which provides deeper historical context for several of the collections displayed here in a more accessible form.