Xinjiang’s Turkic Stone Statues: The Ancient ‘Stone Men’ of the Altai and Junggar

I first met a stone man on a grey October morning, 14 kilometres past a hamlet where the paved road gave up and the steppe took over. He stood alone on a low ridge, carved from a single block of grey granite, his long moustache still readable after perhaps thirteen hundred years in the wind. I had driven 640 kilometres north from the regional capital to reach this quiet corner of Altay, and at that moment the long haul felt like the cheapest ticket in the world.

Most foreign travellers who self-drive Xinjiang come for the lakes and the deserts. They miss the stone men. These standing figures, called balbal by the Turkic peoples who raised them, are scattered across the northern grasslands from the Junggar Basin to the Altai mountains, and they may be the most haunting roadside company you can find in this whole province.

Who Carved the Stone Men, and Why

The figures belong mostly to the Turkic khaganate period, roughly the 6th to 9th centuries, though some earlier examples are tied to Bronze Age traditions. A typical balbal is a human shape cut into a slab, with a round or square face, two eyes, a nose, and a heavy curling moustache that drops past the chin. Many hold a cup or a vessel against the chest.

They were memorials. When a warrior or a chief died, his people set a stone figure to face the rising sun and, often, to face the direction from which enemies might come. Later nomads added their own stones around the original, building up circles of silent witnesses. I counted eleven around one prominent figure near a river bend, each weathered to a different shade of grey.

You do not need a degree in archaeology to feel the weight of it. Stand there long enough and the silence of the grassland starts to feel deliberate, like the statues are keeping a story they agreed never to tell.

Finding Them on the Northern Steppe

The easiest cluster to reach sits in the open country between Karamay and Burqin, a drive of about 330 kilometres that I stretched to two days for the light. The road north climbs out of the basin and onto rolling grassland where the only fixed objects for miles are the stones themselves and the occasional herder’s yurt.

Pull over wherever you see a fence post painted red, the local marker for a protected site. There is no gate, no ticket booth, and usually no other car. I paid nothing at three separate clusters in early October, though one caretaker near a village accepted 20 yuan from me for the thermos of milk tea he pressed into my hands.

The condition varies wildly. Some statues have lost their faces to frost shattering. Others, sheltered by a low hill, show a crisp belt and even the suggestion of a robe’s fold. Bring a telephoto lens if you can; the light at 4 p.m. in autumn rakes across the carving and turns a flat slab into a portrait.

A Rainy Afternoon at the Museum

After three days of chasing figures in the field, I wanted context, so I headed to the Xinjiang Regional Museum on the edge of the regional capital. The stone hall cooled me down fast. Indoor pieces that had been lifted from their grassland pedestals let me study the carving up close, the chisel marks still sharp where a millennium of weather had never touched them.

Entry cost me 30 yuan, and the English signage, while thin, marked which statues came from the Altai and which from farther west. I spent ninety minutes there and left with a much better eye for telling a Turkic balbal from a later Mongol-era marker.

The museum also does something the open steppe cannot. It explains the connection between the stone men and the petroglyphs of the Altai, the carved rock panels where the same moustached faces appear hunting, dancing, and driving chariots. See both and the culture snaps into focus.

Reading the Grassland Itself

Out on the open grassland the statues make most sense as a group.

I parked the car one evening near a site where a single tall figure stood at the centre of a rough stone circle, and I watched the light go long and red across the Junggar. This is the landscape that shaped the belief: endless grass, sudden weather, and a horizon you could read like a page.

The grassland sites are unprotected in the literal sense, which means you are free to walk right up, but it also means the stones need you to be careful. Stay on the tracks. Don’t lean a tripod against a figure. The local herders I met were proud of the statues and quick to scold anyone who treated them like a climbing frame.

Autumn is the season I would pick again. The mosquitoes of July and August were gone by early October, the grass had turned the colour of old gold, and the tourist buses that clog the lake routes had packed up for the year. Pack a -5°C rated bag if you camp; I woke to ice on the windscreen at a site 1,400 metres above sea level.

Reading the Faces: A Traveller’s Field Guide

After a week on the road I got good at telling one stone man from another, and you can too. The easiest clue is the moustache. Early Turkic figures wear a thick moustache that curls down past the jaw, while later ones show a thinner line or none at all. A square-cut face usually marks a 7th-century piece; a rounder, softer face points a century or two later.

Look at the hands next. Many statues cup a shallow bowl or a flask against the chest, the offering a dead man carries into the next world. A few raise the right hand to the chest while the left drops toward the belt, a pose I came to read as a salute. When the carving shows a belt with a rounded buckle, you are likely looking at a person of rank, because the belt was the badge of a mounted noble.

Orientation told me the most. Nearly every figure I found faced east, toward the sunrise, and often toward the open steppe rather than the hills. The nomads meant the dead to keep watch on the land they had ridden. When a statue instead faced a river or a pass, a local guide in Altay told me it marked the route a clan took on its summer move, a detail no museum label mentioned.

Some sites carry a second, smaller stone at the figure’s feet, often a ram or a deer, the companion animal for the journey beyond. I found one such pair near a shallow ford, the little beast worn smooth as a river stone. These companion stones are rarer than the big figures and worth the stop on their own.

Learn to spot them from the car. On the open grassland a standing slab reads as a pale vertical mark against the gold, and once your eye locks on, you start seeing them everywhere: by a well, at a bend, beside a modern fence line where a herder’s grandfather refused to move the old man. Slow down at every pale mark. The best one I found was a figure I almost drove past because it leaned at a drunken angle, half-swallowed by a low hill.

Food, Fuel, and the Long Empty Road

The northern drive tests your planning more than your nerve. Between the larger towns, roadside food means laghman noodles at a county stop or a flatbread pressed hot from a roadside oven, usually 15 to 25 yuan a meal. I carried a box of dates, a vacuum flask, and a block of dried cheese so I could skip a meal without skipping a site when the light was right.

Offline maps saved me. Mobile signal faded to nothing for long stretches north of Karamay, and the grassland tracks that lead to the best statues are not on every navigation app. I downloaded a region map before leaving the regional capital and flagged each known site with a pin, then followed the red fence posts when the pin ran out. A paper atlas from a Urumqi bookstore backed me up, though I never needed to open it.

Give the car a thought too. The empty road invites speed, but the grassland throws up the odd livestock crossing and the rare drifting dune of fine dust that hides a rut. I kept to 90 kilometres an hour on the open stretches and dropped to 40 on any track I could not see across. The rented 4×4 ate the rough stuff without complaint, but a normal sedan would have bottomed out at two of the sites I visited.

Budget for the loop without surprises. Fuel for the full 2,300-kilometre figure-eight ran me about 1,100 yuan. Hotels and yurts came to roughly 1,400 yuan across eleven nights. Museum and minor site fees stayed under 100 yuan. Call it 2,600 yuan all in, not counting the flight or train north that started the trip, and you have one of the better travel values I know.

Other Ancient Sites Worth the Detour

The stone men are rarely the only old thing in a region, and Xinjiang rewards travellers who string ruins into a loop. Down in the south, the Miran ruins sit at the edge of the Lop Desert, a Tibetan-era fort and Buddhist stupas that share the stone men’s sense of lonely endurance. The contrast is the point: oasis brick against steppe granite.

Closer to the Turpan depression, two more stops round out the picture of who lived and prayed here. The Gaochang ruins spread across a flat plain where mud-brick walls still trace a whole abandoned city, and the Jiaohe ancient city clings to a narrow mesa, its streets worn into the earth itself. Neither has a single standing statue, yet both echo the same impulse to mark the land with memory.

I drove a rough figure-eight between north and south over eleven days, covering about 2,300 kilometres in total. The stone men were the thread I kept returning to, the cold grey faces that turned a long drive into a conversation with people who had stood in the same wind thirteen centuries before me.

Practical Notes for the Self-Driver

Plan your fuel with care in the north. Between Karamay and the Altai border towns, full-service stations thin out, and I learned to top up at every town, never letting the gauge drop below half. Diesel ran about 7.4 yuan a litre in October 2025; petrol was close behind. A full tank gave me roughly 520 kilometres of range in the rented 4×4, and I needed most of it on the empty stretches.

Permits are straightforward for the northern grassland sites, which sit inside regular prefectures rather than restricted border zones. I carried my passport and the car’s rental papers at all times, and at two road checks the officers waved me through after a glance. The far northern tip near the border requires an additional travel permit from the local public security office, so build in a morning if Altay city’s outer districts are on your list.

Timing your route matters more than timing your watch. Grassland tracks turn to glue after rain, and I once waited out a three-hour downpour in a roadside teahouse rather than risk a rut I could not climb. Late September through mid-October gave me dry roads, clear air, and the kind of low sunlight that makes a granite face look alive.

Sleep cheap and sleep warm. A county-town hotel near Burqin cost me 180 yuan a night, clean and heated, while a yurt stay on the steppe ran 120 yuan with dinner included. The yurt won on atmosphere; the hotel won on a real shower after a day of dust.

Why the Stone Men Stay With You

I have driven a lot of empty roads in a lot of countries, and few things have stuck like those grey figures facing the dawn. They are not grand like a fortress or pretty like a lake. They are plain, patient, and a little eerie, and that is exactly why they earn a place on a Xinjiang road trip.

Give them a day, or better, two. Pull off wherever a red post appears, walk slow, and let the silence do its work. The stone men have waited thirteen hundred years for someone to notice. You might as well be the one who stops.