Where glorious nature displays its many arts

Circling Sayram Lake is like spinning a ring inlaid with dazzling jewels.

The gems embedded along the 90-kilometer loop of its perimeter shine with different facets — scenic, sacred and storied.

Some destinations sparkle with every luster, depending on the angle they're viewed from.

They're display cases exhibiting nature's many creative talents, not just as a jeweler but also a painter, sculptor, architect, musician and gardener. They show the penmanship of an unseen calligrapher, the chronicles of a timeless historian and the prose of a mythmaker manifested.

For instance, Gangjige Mountain materializes not merely as consecrated land but as deities assuming physical form. Mount Foshan traces the silhouette of a Buddha meditating beside a stone shaped like the hand of the Chinese Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin. Some say the peak was formed from the body of Laozi (Lao Tzu), the legendary founder of Taoism, before he mastered Buddhist enlightenment and turned to stone.

According to Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24) historian Sima Qian's Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, Laozi rode a green ox from Hangu Pass, and "no one knew where he went". The Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) Book of the Later Han mentions: "Some say Laozi entered the (western) land of the barbarian tribes and became a Buddha." Local lore says he fused with the land to become Foshan, and his ox melted to form Sayram.

And so, a story born from an ancient syncretic impulse to unify Taoism and Buddhism lingers. It's written not as scripture on scrolls but rather is inscribed in the silent script of stone and water, narrating a dialogue between our world and the next.

This convergence of beauty and belief is embodied in several sites.

At the Source of the Milk Sea, pilgrims make offerings where springs nurse the waters at the foot of Keguqin Mountain. At Kele Yongzhu, sanctified by the 10th Panchen Lama in 1984, the lake's perpetual thaw creates a chromatic ritual, its springs shifting hue as they drift into the depths.

Beyond Kele Yongzhu's watercolors, nature paints prairies in assorted pigments and genres. Qicai (Seven Color) Bay is a pointillist masterpiece of Technicolor flowers, while Jinhua Zihui is an impressionist swirl of golden buttercups and purple primroses.

The vast mural that is the West Sea Grassland — often called "China's Most Beautiful Sky Grassland" — unfurls across rolling green hills speckled with yaks and framed by the stark Shalicheku Mountain, a 4,189-meter peak whose snowmelt trickles into Sayram like a faucet.

The splotched patterns and vegetive colors of the Camouflage Mountains give this several-kilometer-long subrange its vibrant name. The dappled blobs are clumps of Xinjiang junipers — aka Eurasian, Tianshan or creeping junipers — that smear the tawny slopes with dark-green daubs. These shrubs are harvested and burned to smoke meat and as incense, imparting an olfactory allure in addition to their visual appeal.