With melted snow from more than 5,000-meter-high mountains as its source, Tianchi Lake has developed from an unknown location 30 years ago to one of the best-known tourist spots in Xinjiang today. Ranked as a 5A tourism site in 2007, the highest ranking for a tourism destination in China granted by the National Tourism Administration, the lake attracted 973,000 tourists from around the world last year.

Inam said that at one point, however, the spot's management and facilities were totally overstrained by tourists. Horse excrement from tourist rides, which are randomly offered by local herdsmen, littered the ground everywhere and a strong urine smell hung in the air. "Foreigners used to tell me that the food in Xinjiang was wonderful and people here were hospitable. Their only complaint was that the restrooms smelled too bad to enter," Inam said.

Now all the horses for tourist rides near Tianchi Lake are kept at an equestrian center, where people pay a standard price for rides through a set zone. To solve the lavatory problem, the autonomous region government in 2008 began investing 30 million yuan ($4.4 million) annually to build 300 star-rated public lavatories at tourism destinations and highway stops across the area.

The campaign to upgrade Xinjiang's tourism facilities and services also includes the construction of star-rated hotels and the training of multilingual tour guides. Now Xinjiang has 12 five-star hotels, growing from eight in 2006. The autonomous region's tour guides have grown from fewer than 20 in 1978 to 10,000 today. They offer services in Chinese, Uygur, English, Japanese, Korean and Russian.

Inam said two problems still hinder the autonomous region's tourism development. The first is insufficient investment in infrastructure, especially highways leading to tourist spots. To put the disparity into perspective, Xinjiang contains only two thirds of the total road coverage of east China's Shandong Province, which is a tenth of the size of it's Western counterpart. "

"We cannot purely rely on government investment. We need to attract it from big companies by giving them incentives," Inam said.

The second is to improve tour guides' professionalism, especially their knowledge of Xinjiang's history and culture. "We also badly need ethnic tour guides who can speak a foreign language," Inam said. He said many foreign tourists prefer hiring local guides who can speak about their history and daily lives.

Tapping local markets

In the first four months of 2009, Turpan Prefecture received 239,600 tourists, up 16.25 percent year on year, said the prefecture tourism administration. During the three-day May Day holiday, it received 55,300 tourists, of whom 45 percent came from Xinjiang.

Akbar Kahar, a Turpan tourism administration official, said the number and proportion of tourists going from Urumqi to Turpan have been rising steadily since last year. He said his administration tries to lure well-off urban families who have cars, especially those in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital city, to drive to Turpan. It only takes four hours to drive from Urumqi to Turpan.

Turpan's tourism promotion campaign this year also includes a plan to give away 2 million yuan ($294,000) worth of free tourist spot admission tickets to Urumqi residents. The group is putting advertisements in local hotels, designing new one-day and two-day tour routes and conducting a promotional tour of Turpan's major tourist spots for all major cities in Xinjiang.

"Xinjiang people touring Xinjiang," was the catchphrase for a promotional campaign first launched in 2003 throughout the region to overcome the devastation dropped on Xinjiang's tourism industry after the outbreak of SARS. Now the theme is being reused to get people to visit the area's tourism spots.

Xinjiang people have more money to spend than ever before. According to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Development and Reform Commission, the area's per-capita income grew by around 10 percent in 2008 and Xinjiang's total retail sales grew by a robust 17 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2009.

"I cannot say 2009 is a particularly good year for Xinjiang tourism since the financial crisis and the A/H1N1 flu outbreak will definitely damage the efforts we've made directed to foreign tourists," said Inam. "But we are a country of 1.3 billion people. A moderate increase in domestic tourists to Xinjiang will more than offset the losses."