Chile Pepper Fun Fact - Northwest China's Gobi Desert

It's a dry heat...

The Gobi Desert Is a Red Sea of Chili Peppers

They dry in the sun every autumn in China's Uyghur Autonomous Region.

In Northwest China's Gobi Desert, autumn tints the landscape a flaming scarlet. The fields of red aren’t deciduous leaves blushing with the season. They’re chili peppers, spread out to dry under the hot desert sun following the late-summer harvest. Each September and October, farmers across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which produces a fifth of China’s world-leading pepper harvest, let the harsh sun and 100-plus degree temperatures do the work that most American producers leave to industrial dehydrators.

The result is a red sea of chilies stretching to the horizon. From the ground, the mounds of glossy, fat peppers look like tempting seasoning for a future dinner. From above, the two hundred-plus ton harvest transforms the landscape, staining the khaki-colored desert like blood cells under a microscope.

Blanketing the arid sand of the Uyghur Autonomous Region, the chilies are part of a spice economy that stretches back to the heyday of the Silk Road. Until the 16th century, native spices such as cumin dominated Central Asia's spice trade, and they continue to flavor the cuisine of the Turkic-speaking, majority-Muslim Uyghur people who call this region home. Chilies reached China sometime in the 1500s, one of the many New World foods to spread in Asia as a result of European conquest in the Americas. Chilies took root both in the dry desert soil and the local cuisine.

*Ariel picture of the chile peppers drying in the desert sun.