August 4, 2023 The ten-day research trip has come to an end, hurried and busy. Ten days, for Xinjiang, may be a moment, a moment in the endless stream of time; a long journey of ten thousand kilometers. We have only glimpsed one-thousandth of Xinjiang, yet from this small glimpse, we’ve seen golden glimmers, glimpsed stars rising, glimpsed myriad landscapes. Sweeping across one-sixth of the country’s territory, we caught a glimpse of various common occurrences: the vastness of the northern and southern Xinjiang regions, the myriad history traversing thousands of years—part buried in sand, part growing in oases, and part scattered on the grasslands in the sky....