Where glorious nature displays its many arts

Beyond painting Sayram's grasslands, nature also acts as a sculptor and musician, endowing its depictions of color and texture with form and resonance.

In Donghai Tingtao (Listening to the Waves of the East Sea), millennia of tidal forces have carved the bluffs into colossal sound boxes, tuning the rock to a deep, booming pitch. The surf performs percussion against dozens of kilometers of overhangs that resound with the pounding of each whitecap.

Further along, the sandy strand of Waterfront Bay displays unintentional statues chiseled by erosive forces.

The roughly 10-meter-high pair of stone sails is celebrated as a flagship of Sayram's identity as the "Purest Sea in the Western Region". To the north, the "Turtle Diving Into the Water" seems to plunge into the depths, motionlessly.

But Sayram's most famous figures are carved by one of nature's most curious inventions and depict its very creators — humankind. Two 2,000-year-old "stone men", 38 centimeters and 32 cm tall, stand guard on the lake's northern rim. They gaze eastward over the 27-square-kilometer Three-Tai Grassland, which takes its name from its location in a string of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) military outposts, called tai, connecting Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture with Urumqi. Its appellation comes from its martial functions, but its descriptions hail from the literati who have penned verse venerating its magnificence.

The vast mountain walls that enclose them show Sayram is an architect that builds not only with stone but with life — specifically, living trees rather than lumber.

Its vicinity hosts three tremendous corridors of conifers, the grandest of which is the roughly 50-km Keguqin Spruce Gallery. This palisade leads to the Pine Head Mist Waterfall, where the final breaths of Atlantic moisture land against the Guozi Gorge and precipitate not as rain but as a vertical river of vapor cascading soundlessly into Sayram.

Ultimately, Sayram is a grand hall where Earth exhibits its sublime artistry.

Yet, the final piece of this jeweled band, this vibrant collage of rock and living wood, is us — the human audience. It is we who appreciate its colors, forms, and sounds and interpret these oeuvres into tales that endow water, soil and stone with substance beyond their surface.

To circle Sayram is to understand that its true depth isn't measured in meters but in the layers of meaning we give it.