The Endless Beauty of Balikun Prairie

Balikun Prairie is located in the Hami area in northeastern Xinjiang province, which is also the second-biggest prairie in Xinjiang. There're the muscular cattle and sheep on the great Balikun Prairie where is full of good pasture. Here the sky was quite blue and the air fresh and sweet. The flowers on the grassland were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green like a carpet. It's fair to say that it is an admirable place to come to for summer resort and relaxation in winter.



Balikun Prairie rises 1,650 meters above sea level, with the crystalline snow-capped mountains, the lush green pine forest and the mists and clouds wafting in the air. Here visitors could view the infinite varieties and beauties. Balikun is one broad prairie. Yet it is not quite as the boundless expanse of grassland as the Inner Mongolian grasslands appeared.



Here you could view the sharp horizon where a vast grassland extends to the distant horizons. However, Balikun is one basin, on all sides, wherever your eyes turned, nothing met it but an unending stretch of the mountain summits that connects with the blue sky on all sides as far as the eye can see. These mountains all belong to the Tianshan Mountains; particularly Nan Mountain is very lofty and magnificent.



There're the everlasting snows at the top of the hill. The hillsides are the green dense setting of woods all the year around. After the snow on the summit had melted, some of them flow down along the narrow gully and are nearly out of sight at once, and finally sink into the earth. Some of them just had sunk into the rock cores.



As the saying goes, it looks certainly looked genuine "How high the mountain is while how deep the water is." Everywhere there were signs of the babbling mountainous springs on the mountain. During the summer, the alpine meadow and pasture with the fine watersheds is an extremely excellent place for cattle to escape summer heat.



Only the water in a few gullies could flow out of the mouth of the gulley, which finally turned into the irrigation water of agricultural land on the mountainous plain splay. The effective usable area of Balikun Prairie had reached nearly two hundred thousand mu. During the season with its wild flowers in full bloom and richly green grass, the herdsmen were pouring in by the thousands, grazing animals on the shore of the lake.

The flock of sheep is just like the fluttering puffs of cloud in the sky, dotted with the yurts on the village green. The smoke is spiraling up from the kitchen chimney. The herdsmen here had been always preserved the genuine tradition of the Kazak ethnic group.



On Balikun Prairie of spring, the snow and ice could gradually melt with the warm sunlight. In mid-May, it was a beautiful and cloudless day. The grasses vied with each other in emerging. The grasses are gradually growing under the pacifying of light breeze and fine drops of rain.