Venturing to the Farthest Point on Land From any Ocean on Earth
The Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, located in China's Xinjiang province, may be the furthest land point from any ocean on Earth. Despite being remote, it is far from a backwater.
📍 The European Pole of Inaccessibility, Xinjiang, China
If you've ever wondered where on Earth you could be furthest from any ocean, I found it. The Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility (EPIA), tucked away in a remote valley of China's Xinjiang province, lies over 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) from the nearest coastline. That's farther than the distance between New York and Denver, a 5-hour flight. Picture yourself marooned not on an island, but in the heart of the world’s most vast continent. The desert that claims the EPIA also lays claim to the Turfan Depression, the second-lowest point on the planet. Here, oven-like temperatures can spike to 120 Fahrenheit.
I thought a place so geographically remote would also be a sleepy backwater. It is anything but. The area surrounding the EPIA has become the linchpin of "One Belt, One Road," China's grand strategy to link itself to the economies of western Asia. For a nation so often associated with its eastern coastal megacities, this is a westward lunge of historic proportions.
That ambition, though, comes with a human cost. The Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people, see Xinjiang as their homeland. Their cultural ties run deep into Central Asia, not Beijing. And now they find themselves caught between the ambitions of the world's second largest economy.
China’s furthest flung province wasn't always one place ruled from afar. Xinjiang – a merger of the Uyghur Tarim Basin and the Tibetan-Buddhist Dzungaria Desert – means “New Frontier” and is a 19th century Qing Dynasty creation. The echoes of America's "Manifest Destiny", a period of zealous westward expansion from the Mississippi River to California in the early 1800s, are hard to miss. Remote territory rebranded, resources untapped, the locals, well... that part gets messy in both stories.
Modern China has made the area around the EPIA a hotspot. By encouraging Han and Hue workers and their families to settle in this remote province, the demographic makeup has undergone a profound shift, with non-native populations now comprising the majority. Ironically, the farthest point from any ocean is now the site of one of the largest economic resettlements in modern history.
