A river used to run through Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Fed by the towering, snow-capped Tianshan mountain range, the Urumqi River arced gracefully through the city centre past Red Hill and the 18th-century red-brick pagoda that still stands atop it as the city's most visible and beautiful landmark.
Poets and explorers extolled the beauty of the scene, and the grasslands sustained by the river gave the city its name - Urumqi means 'beautiful pasture' in ancient Mongolian.
'In the 1960s we had a beautiful river here,' recalls Liu Yusheng, deputy director-general of Urumqi's Foreign Affairs Office. 'Of course it was a seasonal river. The water would begin to flow in April and May, and by July and August, it would be more than 100 metres wide.'
But today, the Urumqi River has been shunted aside into a narrow concrete channel, and flows only when heavy rain makes it necessary to release water from reservoirs upstream.
The wide river bed over which it flowed in the hot summer months has been paved over and is now a six-lane expressway named - without a trace of irony - Riverbank Drive. It was completed in 1997, ostensibly to celebrate Hong Kong's return to the motherland.
The fate of this river at the very heart of Xinjiang's capital is symbolic of a larger trend that is evident across the region. As urban populations grow, especially in the industrialised cities built by Han Chinese settlers in northern Xinjiang, the waters that once fed rivers and lakes are being diverted for industrial and agricultural use.