A place made of jewels, art and frost

Altay's landscapes aren't just likened to gems and artworks — they are them.

On the city's Five-Hundred Li Folk Street, they're rendered as "gemstone paintings", their shapes and colors excavated from locally mined minerals ground to a fine dust or crushed into coarse crumbs.

Indeed, the city's very name derives from the old Turkic root word for gold, its meaning echoed in the Uygur, Kazakh, and Mongolian languages spoken in the region — a testament to its legacy as a land of riches mined in its mountains since time immemorial.

This terrain's treasured bond with precious minerals has alchemized its natural scenery into a cultural tableau, in which soil shapes images of Earth and stone illustrates the very ground from which it was taken. Powdered mountains are transformed into mirrors that reflect themselves and the world that shines beyond their peaks.

In the avenue's crown jewel, the Zhenyu Tang Gemstone Painting Studio, luminary artist Liu Quanxia deconstructs and re-creates the surrounding world. She uses granulated minerals dug from the very lands she depicts. She engineers Altay's geological DNA into new protein guises, collapsing its double helix into 2D interpretations to develop a new species of "painting".

Liu deploys techniques such as wire inlay, embedding, adhesion, layering, stacking, relief and carving to form mosaics from olivine, garnet, quartz, topaz, agate, malachite, aquamarine, gold-silk jade, epidote, schorl, lapis lazuli, jet stone, cinnabar, gold and tourmaline.

One of her works even depicts an iron mine using minerals — but not iron.

Her motifs include such icons of Altay as Kanas Lake's bays, birch trees and eagles; Chinese subjects like the creation goddess, Nyuwa, and Shanxi province's ancient architecture; and globally recognized symbology, like a re-creation of Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps. These take months or years to finish, but offer endless hours of appreciation for countless viewers.

Likewise, the whole of the kilometer-long Five-Hundred Li Folk Street is akin to walking through a vast, open-air gallery where the exhibits are life itself. It is Altay, rendered in miniature and then magnified, like a snow globe.

In winter, the glow of Kazakh weddings and bonfires "the size of pine trees" transmit warmth and light into long nights, sometimes beneath the shimmer of the aurora borealis. Summer brings the eyebrow-raising, jaw-dropping spectacle of dawazi — Uygur acrobatics featuring stunts like unicycle rides on tightropes — alongside handicraft markets. Lantern riddles add an air of mystery to the 15th day of the Chinese New Year.