A town in the cold desert

With what grows here (barley and dredge, millet), this land can feed a town of about 1,200 people from farms less than a day's cart from its walls.

Build a town in the cold desert

A town of 10,000 here

Its grain comes from 73 km around, 3 days by cart (fragile). About 1,000 villages and 79,000 country people farm it, and the town keeps about 40 scholars. A city of 40,000 cannot live off this land alone.

In history

Turpan, in Xinjiang, lies in one of the deepest depressions on Earth, at the foot of the Tian Shan. It lives on karez: lines of wells joined by underground channels that bring the runoff of the mountains down by gravity, hidden from the sun so it does not evaporate. Records of the karez go back to the Han dynasty, and over 1,100 remain, more than 5,000 km of channels. Caravans, sometimes of thousands of camels, rested there for a week or more. Further east, Dunhuang began as a Han frontier garrison peopled with settlers; by the second century AD it had more than 76,000 inhabitants, and caravans loaded their water and food there before the desert crossing.

On the Iranian plateau, Kerman has a cold desert climate, with hot summers and cold winters. Towns like it kept ice all summer in yakhchāls: domed ice houses with deep pits of up to 5,000 cubic metres and walls at least two metres thick at the base, built of a mortar of sand, clay, egg white, lime, goat hair and ash. One still stands at Kerman. Its wealth did not protect it: in 1794, after taking the city, Lotf Ali Khan was besieged in it for six months by Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar, and when Kerman fell many of its men were killed or blinded.

How large a city?

PeopleGrain fromBy cartVillagesScholars
3,00040 km around2 days (strained)31012
10,00073 km around3 days (fragile)1,00040
40,000150 km around6 days (not by land alone)4,200160
150,000280 km around11.5 days (not by land alone)16,000600
1,000,000730 km around29.5 days (not by land alone)100,0004,000

Living there

Its woods spare enough to burn: about 18,000 tonnes of wood a year for its hearths and workshops. Provisional figure.

Its market sells grain, herbs, wool, horses and cheese, and buys timber and iron. About 220 market towns stand in its countryside.

About 50% of what its people eat does not come from the fields. Of that share: herds 90%, gardens 10%. That is some 10,000 livestock units on 150 km² of pasture. Hearth estimate.

What makes it hard

  • The year swings from heat to deep cold: hot summers with blowing sand, then long freezing winters. Every crop has to fit between the frosts.
  • The water is underground and borrowed from distant mountains. If the glaciers upstream shrink, the channels run thinner and the fields shrink with them.
  • Caravans are the town's living and its burden: hundreds of animals and their drivers arrive at once, wanting pasture, food and water from the same oasis that feeds the town.
  • A frontier oasis is a garrison first. Dunhuang was founded after a war, joined to the Great Wall and watched over by a line of beacon towers running west into the desert.

Hard years

About one year in 8, the harvest falls below four fifths of a normal one: the town is short of some 410 of the 1,400 tonnes of grain its land gives it, with no water to bring the gap in. A plague that kills 39% of the town, as the Black Death did in Europe's towns, would leave about 6,500 km² of its fields idle.

What it can make

Grain (at a cost), Flax (at a cost), Orchards (at a cost), Herbs, Wool, Horses, Cattle and hides (at a cost), Cheese, Pigs and bacon (at a cost), Goats, Camels, Honey and wax (at a cost), Furs

What its land cannot give, a town here must buy: timber.

What it lives on

Barley and dredge, Millet

Underground

What a city digs depends on the rock under it: Granite, Volcanic rock, Ultramafic rock (peridotite, serpentinite), Schist and gneiss, Marble, Limestone and chalk, Sandstone, shale and clay, Salt beds, River gravels and sands

Found here

Gathered (Rerum): Bactrian Camel Meat, Bactrian Camel Milk, Bactrian Camel Wool, Beetle Wing, Sagebrush Leaves, Sagebrush Seeds, Chukar Egg, Chukar Meat

Hear it

Cold Desert in Biomes: plants, animals, hazards and sounds

The same climate

A town in the cold desert, on a river, A town in the cold desert, on the coast

By city size

1,000, 3,000, 10,000, 30,000, 100,000, 300,000, 1,000,000

Sources

Open the city builder — MGS Toolbox