Yu-tien

After one day of observation we met Comrade Ts'uan Hsiao-hua, Secretary of the Party Committee of the Yu-tien Vanguard People's Commune, who is leading the reclamation movement in this region. He told us, "In February of this year, Wu Chi-min, the first secretary of Yu-tien Hsien, led a dozen or so cadres from the people's commune, riding donkeys, carrying water and rations, and prospecting along the Keria River for waste lands. Each day they slept on the sand dunes or on the grasses. They drank water and ate rations. In the journey of several hundred li, the discovered many places with surface water, reeds, and swamps, so they confidently said, 'Where there is water and land, we can grow crops.'

1961 March 6, Hsiao Ying, Sung Cheng-hou, and others, “A Trip into the Takla Makan Desert”, in SELECTIONS FROM JEN-MIN JIH-PAO, PEIPING, ON GEOLOGY, EXPLORATION, WEATHER FORECASTING, AND CARTOGRAPHY, United States Joint Publications Research Office, →OCLC, page 9