Note: Over the next seven days, I'll be traveling across northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region as part of People's Daily Online's "China Momentum" program. I'll be writing daily about what I see and experience.

My morning began with the trip from Hami to Turpan. These days there's no need for camels or a slow crossing of the desert between them. There's something a bit faster, high-speed trains. What once took caravans days now takes under two hours, gliding past more or less the same stretch of ground those merchants once sweated across on foot. It's not just Hami to Turpan either. High-speed rail has been steadily stitching Xinjiang together, station by station, shrinking the region down to something that fits inside a single workday, which I'm thankful for, as I got a lot of places left to visit.

But more about Turpan.

A mural with Turpan and it's Chinese name, "Tulufan," as well as a famous scene from the Chinese epic "Journey to the West" in Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Wang Yuheng)

Hot, yes. That's the first word that comes to anyone's mind who knows the place, and they'd be right. My visit, thanks to a bit of cloud cover and what locals kept insisting was a mild day, topped out around 40 degrees Celsius. Honestly, it wasn't that bad. Anyone who's spent a summer somewhere humid will tell you it's never really the heat that gets you, it's the moisture in the air. Turpan's heat is dry, almost clean, and I learned pretty quickly that dryness isn't just something people here endure. It's something they've learned to put to work.

That became clear at my first stop, the Turpan Natural Environment Test and Research Center. From June through September, engineers here run new-energy vehicles, solar panels, air conditioners, plastics and metal components through punishing heat and sand endurance tests. More than 350 pieces of outdoor exposure and monitoring equipment sit under the Turpan sun, deliberately subjecting products to the conditions they might one day have to survive.

Various street signs' heat resistance is being tested at the Turpan Natural Environment Test and Research Center in Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Michael Kurtagh)

Turpan now handles more than 95 percent of China's high-temperature, dry-heat vehicle testing business, work that brings in tens of millions of yuan a year and helps validate the new-energy equipment the country is racing to build. Standing in a lot full of cars baking on purpose in the sun, I found something slightly strange about it. A climate most people would spend their lives trying to escape had become something Turpan could sell.

And then there are the grapes.

Grape Valley sits in a canyon carved along the west side of the Flaming Mountains, and its seedless white grapes, nicknamed the "pearl" for their sugar content, are about as close to a local celebrity as a fruit can get.

In Grape Valley, that's more or less what's happened.

Different varieties of dried grapes hanging on display in Grape Valley, Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Wang Yuheng)

What used to be a place people passed through to pick and sell grapes has become something bigger. There are drying houses where visitors can still see the old raisin-making craft, folk performances staged right among the vineyards, and homestays run mostly by Uygur families. There are 78 of them now, tucked along lanes with names like Frog Alley.

A women sits in front of a painting of grapes in Grape Valley, Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Wang Yuheng)

I walked around for a while, watching families sell bags of raisins, dried fruit and other products made from the grapes. What caught my attention most were the children. They seemed to move effortlessly between the family business and the tourists, explaining the products, answering questions and making sales, switching effortlessly into Mandarin. They weren't standing there as some kind of tourist attraction. During summer vacation, they were just helping their parents, slipping into the role as naturally as children anywhere might help out at a family shop.

A child sells grapes in Grape Valley, Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Wang Yuheng)

The grapes are no longer just something grown here. They have become a way for families to build businesses around their homes, and for the next generation to grow up speaking the language of both the vineyard and the visitor.

A man playing an instrument sits below hanging grapes in Grape Valley, Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Wang Yuheng)

Beyond the dry heat, part of what makes the grapes so good is Turpan's water. Despite sitting in one of the hottest basins on Earth, the water here comes down cold, fed by snow and glacier melt off the Tianshan Mountains and carried through the Karez Wells, underground channels that have kept this oasis alive for centuries.

And that cold water is the reason something else is thriving here that genuinely stopped me in my tracks: salmon.

A worker captures a salmon in a net at a desert salmon farm in Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Michael Kurtagh)

When I think of salmon, I think of Norway. When I think of Norway, I don't think of Turpan. I had to check it out for myself.

The water pulled up through the Karez here stays at a steady 15 to 19 degrees Celsius year-round, cold and clean enough that one company has built a full cold-water fish operation in the middle of the desert. The fish are raised in circulating tanks, and the wastewater, still rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, gets piped straight into the vineyards. One source of water, doing double duty.

Salmon feed at a desert salmon farm in Turpan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Michael Kurtagh)

The company now ships its fish across the country, putting locally raised salmon on tables far from the desert where it is produced. It has also found a way to bring local grape farmers into the business, supplying them with fish to raise alongside their vines and guaranteeing to buy the harvest back. The same water that helps grow the grapes creates another source of income alongside them.

Looking up at the grape drying houses and standing next to those fish tanks, I kept coming back to the same thought: none of this really looks like a fight against Turpan's climate.

The heat tests the cars. The cold water raises the fish. The sun sweetens the grapes.

Nobody here beat the desert. They just figured out what it was good for.

Five days to go. Time for a quick stop in Xinjiang's capital.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Wu Chengliang)