The Pearl River Delta (PRD) region is in the southeasten part of Guangdong. Adjacent to Hong Kong and Macao SARs, it faces Southeast Asia across the sea, and is called China's "South Gate" for its developed transport network.
The northwestern inland area comprises Gansu Province and the Xinjiang Uygur, Ningxia Hui and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions. It is the dry region and experiences an annual rainfall of about 200 mm. It is a vast but sparsely populated area with dry weather and itte vegetation.
Apart from stretches of deserts, Northwest China also has vast expanses of grassland covering a cumulative area of 300 million hectares. The Inner Mongolian Grassland accounts for one-third of the national total, and offers high-quality grass and ideal conditions for the development of the herding in-dustry. It is one of China's major livestock product bases.
Northwest China has stretches of infertile deserts with the Taklamakan and Gobi being the most prominent. But the deserts comprise just a part of the region. The area consists of many high mountain ranges such as the Qilian Mountain in Gansu and the Tianshan, Kunlun and Altai mountains in Xinjiang, which have an average altitude of about 2,000 m.
The Silk Road refers to the famous ancient trade road that ran from Chang’an (present-day Xi'an), through the eastern part of Gansu and the Hexi Corridor to the Yumen Pass and Yangguan Pass. Then it forked out from Xinjiang to Central Asia, Europe and India.
