The Dzungarian Gate (or Altai Gap or Altay Gap) is a geographically and historically significant mountain pass between China and Central Asia. It has been described as the "one and only gateway in the mountain-wall which stretches from Manchuria to Afghanistan, over a distance of three thousand miles []." Given its association with details in a story related by Herodotus, it has been linked to the location of legendary Hyperborea.
The Dzungarian Gate (; Jetısu qaqpasy or Жоңғар қақпасы Joñğar qaqpasy) is a straight valley which penetrates the Dzungarian Alatau mountain range along the border between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, China. It currently serves as a railway corridor between China and the west. Historically, it has been noted as a convenient pass suitable for riders on horseback between the western Eurasian steppe and lands further east, and for its fierce and almost constant winds.
In his Histories, Herodotus relates travelers' reports of a land in the northeast where griffins guard gold and where the North Wind issues from a mountain cave. Given the parallels between Herodotus' story and modern reports, scholars such as Carl Ruck, J.D.P. Bolton and Ildikó Lehtinen have speculated on a connection between the Dzungarian Gate and the home of Boreas, the North Wind of Greek mythology. With legend describing the people who live on the other side of this home of the North Wind as a peaceful, civilized people who eat grain and live by the sea.
Its gateway status is now supplanted by the new gateway city of Khorgas.
Geography
The windswept valley of the Dzungarian Gate, wide at its narrowest, is located between Lake Alakol to the northwest, part of the Balkhash-Alakol Basin in Kazakhstan, and Ebinur Lake () to the southeast in China. At its lowest, the floor of the valley lies at about elevation, while the surrounding peaks of the Dzungarian Alatau range reach about to the northeast and to the southwest.
Douglas Carruthers, who explored the area in the first decade of the 20th century, writes:The Dzungarian Gate is a defile about six miles wide at its narrowest point, and forty-six miles long, connecting Southern Siberia with Dzungaria. It forms a natural pathway from the plateau of Mongolia to the great plain of North-western Asia, and is the one and only gateway in the mountain-wall which stretches from Manchuria to Afghanistan, over a distance of three thousand miles. On the west, the Ala-tau drops suddenly from peaks above snow-line to the level of the floor of the depression, 700 feet above the level of the ocean,—the lowest altitude in the inland basins of Central Asia, with the exception of the Turfan depression, which is actually below sea-level.
Geologically, the valley of Dzungarian Gate was created by the active strike-slip Dzungar fault system. In strike-slip faults the blocks slide past each other laterally, and in this case they do so in a counter-clockwise direction or dextrally, similar to the famous San Andreas Fault.
Remarking on it as a geological and physical phenomenon, Carruthers continues:[T]he Dzungarian Gate is as unusual as that of the Jordan depression. They are both examples of a rift-valley caused by the movement of the earth's crust, not by the action of water. This valley once formed the connecting link between the drainage of Dzungaria and that of Southern Siberia. The chain of lakes at either end of the valley (Balkash, Ala Kul, Ebi Nor, etc.), are the remains of the great Asiatic Mediterranean Sea; if their waters were to rise a few hundred feet they would break through the Gate, flooding the plains to the north and south.
Noting that, "In prehistoric days the Dzungarian Gate must have presented a still more wonderful sight" when it "formed a narrow strait joining the Dzungarian inlet with the vast seas of Western Siberia," Carruthers quotes the British journalist and MP, Morgan Philips Price, with whom he travelled:One can picture the Dzungarian Gate in the Ice Age: a narrow strait through which the Arctic-AraloCaspian Sea ebbed and flowed into the seas of Central Asia, scoured by icebergs descending from ancient glaciers on the Ala-tau and Barlik Mountains and forested perhaps down to the water's edge,—not unlike the Straits of Belle Isle at the present day. Now a change has been wrought; earth-movement has drained the sea. But away to the north there still remain the lakes of Ala Kul, Sasik Kul, and Balkash, and on the south Ebi Nor,—pools left in the desert—all that remains of the great icy sea. The alluvial plains, once its bed, are now covered by desert grasses, while the forest clings only to the shaded slopes and gullies on the northern slopes of the mountains.