Gobi Desert
— — a desert that goes cold at night.
Not only on a wall.
“A cold desert that runs across southern Mongolia and into northern China, more than a million square kilometres of gravel plain, red rock, and a thin run of dune. At Bayanzag, the Flaming Cliffs glow red at sunset, the cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews found the first dinosaur eggs in 1922. The Khongoryn Els sing under a hard wind. Bactrian camels graze the lower valleys. The night sky is the kind that erases ambient light.
Gobi Desert, 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.
The Gobi is a cold desert covering roughly 1.3 million square kilometres across southern Mongolia and northern China, the fifth largest desert in the world. Unlike the Sahara, its elevation runs between 900 and 1,500 metres and winter temperatures fall below minus 30 Celsius. The Mongolian section holds Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park, established in 1993 and the country's largest at about 27,000 square kilometres. The terrain is largely gravel plain, with the dune field of Khongoryn Els and the sandstone cliffs of Bayanzag as outliers.
The Khongoryn Els run about 180 kilometres along the southern edge of the Gobi Altai, with dunes rising to roughly 300 metres. Locals call them duut mankhan, the singing dunes, for the deep hum the sand makes when a hard wind moves the upper face. The population density of the Mongolian Gobi is among the lowest on earth, under one person per square kilometre. At night the only lights are the ger camps and the stars, with the Milky Way visible from horizon to horizon.
The Gobi has a continental climate with summer highs reaching 40 Celsius and winter lows below minus 30. The window for travel runs from late May to early October. Bayanzag, the Flaming Cliffs, was the site of Roy Chapman Andrews' 1922 American Museum of Natural History expedition, which recovered the first scientifically described dinosaur eggs. The cliffs still yield fossils today, and Gobi Gurvansaikhan is reached by road or charter flight from Ulaanbaatar to Dalanzadgad, the provincial centre.