Karez Well-Sinking Technique

The karez, anciently called the "well-canal," is a distinctive underground water works created by the working people of Turpan from long practice, drawing on the basin's terrain, sun and air patterns to tap groundwater by gravity along the slope. The sinking technique entered the third Xinjiang provincial ICH list in 2012 and was approved into the fourth national ICH list by the State Council in 2014. The karez works themselves were listed among China's major protected cultural heritage sites in 2006, a rare unity of tangible and intangible heritage protection.

A karez has four parts—vertical shafts, an underground tunnel, an open channel and a storage pond: workers first sink a line of vertical shafts along the water vein to fix the route and remove soil, then dig the tunnel upstream from the outlet to link the shafts and bring water to the surface, where the open channel feeds it into the pond. The whole work relies on handed-down skills of grading, alignment and digging, with no mechanical power, earning the karez its name as China's "underground canal."

Ranked with the Great Wall and the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal as one of ancient China's three great works, the karez is the lifeline that let oasis civilisation endure, and its sinking technique condenses the wisdom by which Turpan's forebears lived with the desert, holding outstanding historical, scientific and cultural value.

The karez system and its sinking craft can be seen on the ground at sites such as the Turpan Karez Folk Park.