Ürümqi
— — the farthest city from any sea.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a city of about four million people at the northern foot of the Tianshan. By straight-line distance, no major city on Earth sits farther from any ocean. The bazaars carry the languages of the old Silk Road. The mountains hold snow into early summer.
Ürümqi, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ürümqi is the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China, with a metropolitan population of about 4.05 million in the 2020 census. The city sits at roughly 800 metres elevation on the northern slope of the Tianshan range, in the Junggar Basin. By Guinness World Records, it is the most inland major city on Earth, lying about 2,500 kilometres from the nearest open sea. The region has been a node on the Silk Road for more than two millennia, joining Han Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh, Hui, and Kyrgyz communities.
The continental climate brings hard winters and warm, dry summers. January averages drop below minus ten degrees Celsius; July highs reach the low thirties. Annual precipitation is roughly 290 millimetres, most of it falling between May and August. The Bogda Shan, the eastern arm of the Tianshan, rises south of the city to 5,445 metres at Bogda Peak. Heavenly Lake, Tianchi, holds at 1,910 metres in a glacial cirque about a hundred kilometres east of the centre and freezes from November to April.
The Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar, opened in 2003 in the Erdaoqiao district, draws on the architecture of Central Asian caravan markets. Hongshan Park rises in the centre of the city, with its nineteenth-century pagoda visible from the surrounding streets. Diwopu International Airport, sixteen kilometres northwest of the centre, connects Ürümqi to Beijing, Shanghai, and several Central Asian capitals. The Lanzhou-Xinjiang high-speed railway, completed in 2014, made the city reachable from Lanzhou in roughly eleven hours, opening the Hexi Corridor route to scheduled service.