A mirage, come true

The Silk Road city of Dunhuang is an oasis shaped by the sands of time that has survived and thrived in the desert for millennia. The ancient refuge in one of the planet's toughest terrains sired an international settlement in no-man's land and continues to lure travelers from around the world, Erik Nilsson reports.

Dunhuang appears as if a mirage come true in the desert - an oasis, an island of water in a sea of sand that seems as if it could not be but is. Camels once functioned like cargo boats that floated across the dunes that still crash like waves in the ocean of parched earth that led to this refuge constructed at the crossroads of thirst for water and hunger for trade.

The intersection of two major Silk Road routes in the Gobi, near the edge of the Taklimakan Desert, whose name translates as "place of no return", enabled passage through one of the least-hospitable swaths of the planet's surface.