A settlement of unbounded frontiers

Baihaba village sits on China's northwesternmost edge, where it occupies overlapping realms of identity, Erik Nilsson reports in Altay, Xinjiang.

Visitors giggle as they jiggle the plump rumps of Altay big-tail sheep in China's northwesternmost village, Baihaba. These creatures' bouncy backsides have become an endearing icon of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region's Altay Mountains. They appear on postcards, fridge magnets and plushies in souvenir shops. Viral videos of their waggling rears get millions of views online.

It's fun and funny. But it was once the serious business of survival.

This novelty was born of necessity, since, until recent decades, every precious calorie that villagers consumed was laboriously wrested from animals and potatoes.

In this frosty land — classified as Siberian not by geography but by biome — herders have long judged sheep's health by their hindquarters' heft. The animals evolved exaggerated humps on their posteriors, like those on a camel's back, as bulwarks against unforgiving winters, when grass sleeps under 2-meter blankets of snow.

Humans spent generations selectively breeding this natural trait to its extreme. The now-quaint tradition of tapping their blubbery behinds is a relic of an era when this manual assessment of lipid reserves was a matter of making it through the year — or not.

Yet, this peculiar line between life and death, in this case traced by the shape of a sheep's tail end, is just one of many borderlands that Baihaba straddles.

Remote crossroads

The village is positioned in a liminal space where China ends and Kazakhstan begins, the Siberian taiga collides with the Central Asian steppe, and a nomadic past is migrating toward a settled present.

Multiple ethnicities form a collective identity. Yet the local Tuva people wander across various frontiers of selfhood, preserving a language, conventions and heritage that set them apart from other Mongolians in China and Tuvans in Russia.

Baihaba is one of only three settlements in China inhabited by this ethnic Mongolian subgroup, whose population numbers around 2,500 in the country.

They speak a Turkic dialect closely related to that of Russian Tuvans, but their culture is uniquely their own, with local lore claiming they're the descendants of Genghis Khan's secret treasure guard.

The categorizations among fauna are similarly permeable, including delineations between domesticated and wild.

Semi-feral dogs snooze in human homes at night and spend their days roaming freely. Cows rove unhindered, causing traffic jams and stealing nibbles from unattended garbage trucks. Locals remind visitors to lock their doors, lest these bovines wander into their rooms.

It's another testimony to the people's symbiotic relationship with animals in a locale where livestock outnumber people five to one.

Baihaba is home to 4,875 grazing mammals, and a human population of 575 ethnic Kazaks, 390 Tuvans, seven Han and one Hui, according to the official 2023 tally.

Baihaba's people have long lived in isolation in this tract of valleys and foothills horseshoed on three sides by the Altay Mountains.

The settlement's location at 48 degrees north and 87 degrees east has earned it the title of China's First Northwestern Village. Just a stone's throw from the border, a large rock engraved with this designation draws visitors from around the world, who line up to snap selfies in front of this marker at the edge of China.

Since Kazakhstan begins where the village ends, visitors must obtain border passes to enter Baihaba.

The boundary is etched by the cutting waters of the Haba River, the second-largest tributary of the Irtysh — China's only river that empties into the Arctic Ocean.

Natural appeal

Altay prefecture's landscape dresses up for each season, wearing wildflowers like sequins in spring, emerald foliage in summer, golden leaves in autumn and sheer white during winter. A frosty cloak dominates its wardrobe with eight months of snowfall and average annual temperatures of — 0.2 C.

Baihaba's unique intersection of geography and geology endows it with China's lowest snowline, which sinks to 2,850 meters. Here, the Altay Mountains plunge into the Junggar Basin and taiga collides with prairies to forge an ecotone found nowhere else in China.

A single sweeping view reveals five disparate worlds — the piedmont alluvial oasis plains below 800 meters, shrubland meadows, Siberian forests, periglacial tundra and the forever-frozen alpine zone above 3,000 meters.

Its predominant taiga trees take their names from their biome, which, in turn, takes its name from Russia's notoriously frigid hinterland.

Siberian larch is called the "King of Altay". These deciduous conifers that shed their needles in winter reign over the shadowlands on sunlight-starved north-facing slopes. Siberian spruce and Siberian fir stud the foothills with evergreens shaped like the cones that dangle from their boughs. Siberian pine seeds — erroneously referred to as cedar nuts — are integral links in the food chain, nourishing humans and wildlife alike.

These conifers yield to aspen and poplar at lower elevations. But birch rules this dominion, with its silver bark and golden autumn leaves shining as a symbol of Altay.

Further downhill, flowers flutter like confetti in summer, speckling the prairies of China's most botanically diverse grassland.

Beyond borders

Baihaba may be freezing most of the time but is by no means frozen in time.

Its position among overlapping frontiers of identity — ethnicity, species, geography, geology and ecology — beckons a growing number of outsiders, who have been making the long journey to this tightly knit far-flung community in recent years.

This is transforming these transhumant people's lives and livelihoods, as they retain their itinerant herding camps while transitioning toward fixed tourism.

Travel surged after the region became the filming site for the hit TV series, To the Wonder, in 2024.

The eight-episode drama takes inspiration from Lu Xun Literary Prize winner Li Juan's 2010 compilation of autobiographical essays, My Altay.

China National Geography named Baihaba as one of China's Eight Most Beautiful Towns. The central government designated it as an official Traditional Chinese Village.

China's leading photography and art associations listed it as a top destination for their respective vocations.

Travelers stroll around the First Village, gaze across the chasmic China-Kazakhstan Border Grand Canyon and ride horses that trot over the Yegende grassland.

They snap selfies in front of the Lone Tree that stands as a solitary silhouette against the backdrop of sheer mountains and hop on swing sets on the Bate Bayi Platform overlooking the red-pine cabins that fill the valley below like dice tossed by giants.

Seasonal celebrations include grassland skiing and zagu drum-smashing during Spring Festival, and communal outdoor hotpot feasts.

The warmer months herald a 5-kilometer rainbow run across the prairie and grassland scavenger hunts. Bonfire parties feature performances of Kazak dombra (lutes) and Tuvan khoomei throat singing, in which a single vocalist produces two growling voices simultaneously.

Starting next summer, tourists can visit the Golden Lotus Valley, where these yellow flowers used in traditional medicine blaze bright like torches lighting up the landscape throughout June.

Visitors can watch horse races, horseback archery, Mongolian wrestling and kokpar, a regional variant of a Central Asian equestrian sport in which two teams tussle over a sheep hide on horseback.

There are also mass feasts, such as the midsummer tudou yan — a banquet in which every dish uses potatoes — and a comparable August meal of mutton that uses every part of the animal and features a boiled-head speed-eating contest.

Yurts become stalls selling homemade cheese, yogurt, horsemilk liquor and crispy baursak fried bread.

These meals fuse Tuvan and Kazak cuisines, ingredients sourced from icy mountains and verdant prairies, and nomadic production and tourism retail.

Ultimately, this influx of outsiders and the new economy that's arriving with them doesn't dim but rather amplifies Baihaba's singular character.

China's northwesternmost village reminds us that some borders aren't boundaries.

They're not just lines on a map but are thresholds sometimes crisscrossed by cultures, ecologies and centuries.

In this corner of the country in the middle of the Altay Mountains, these outline the profile of one of the most distinctive and captivating corners of Xinjiang, China and the world.