LOCATION AND AREA

Directly under the jurisdiction of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and with its government seat 150 kilometers from Urumqi, the city if Shihezi is located on the riverside of the Manas on the northern foot of the Tianshan Mountains and covers an area of 460 aquare kilometers with an average elevation of 450.8 meters.

HISTORY

The legend has it that two hundred years ago, the Qing Dynasty government set up a small courier station here where camel trains, caravans and Qing troops could rest. In 1876, some troops of the Qing general Zuo Zongtang’s army stationed in the Mosuowan area north of Shihezi were buried by the vast sea of desert. Before liberation, there were only twenty households or so in the Shihezi area, which was then surrounded by the Gobi Desert. There was also a dried-up river with a graves covered bed, thus the name Shihezi (the Stone River). After liberation, the Farming and Reclamation Corps of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) started to reclaim the land here. In the last thirty years or so, a completely new city, Shihezi City, has been founded which has been eulogized as the “Bright Pearl in the Gobi Desert.”

PPOPULATION AND NATIONALITIES

Shihezi has a population of 550,000, with an urban population of 210,000 and a population of 330,000 in agricultural and husbandry farms. It has thirteen nationalities, with the Han majority making up 96.2 percent of the total population.

ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS

Directly under the jurisdiction of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Shihezi is the seat of the headquarters of the Eighth Division of the Production and Construction Corps of PLA.

CLIMATE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

Shihezi, 430 to 520 meters above sea level, is located on the alluvial fan of the Manas River at the northern foot of the Tianshan Mountains, with a two percent gradient from south to north and 0.9 percent from east to west. The ground surface of the urban area is covered by a layer of clayey soil 50 to 200 cm thick, and below this clayey layer is a tremendously thick and highly saturated layer of sand and gravel. The underground water here has a gradient of 0.24 peprcent and comes out of the ground in the form of springs in the area norht of the Urumqi-Ili Highway. The coefficient of permeability is 80 to 120 meters a day. The quality of the water is high, with a mineral content of between 0.2 and 1 g/1. The Manas River system has a total length of 324 kilometers, a drainage area of 4,700 square kilometers, and annual runoff of 1.26 billion cubic meters and 0.39 billion cubic meters of spring water. The Manas forms the boundary between Shihezi, Manas County and Shawan County and is the water source for the counties of Shhihezi and Eighth Division. Shihezi is located in the temperate zone of a dry continental climate with the highest temperature reaching 42.8?, the lowest –39.8?, a frost-free period of 165 days, the deepest snows 40 centimeters, the thickest ice 50 centimeters, a frozen-earth depth of between 70 and 140 centimeters and an annual mean sunshine time of 2,809 hours. The annual average wind speed is 2.1 meters per second and the annual average number of windstorm days is twenty-six. There are coal and limestone deposits in the mountain area in the northern part of the Tianshan Mountains, seventy kilometers from the Shihezi city proper.