Western Tian Shan
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How it came to be
Western Tien-Shan lies in the western part of the Tian Shan, one of the largest mountain systems in the world, and is shared by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It ranges from 700 to 4,503 metres and holds a great diversity of forest types and unique plant communities. The Tian Shan runs about 2,900 km east from Tashkent, and its western part is of global importance as a centre of origin for a number of cultivated fruit crops.
Among the trees of the Tian Shan is the wild apple Malus sieversii: DNA analysis after the apple genome was sequenced in 2010 identified it as the primary ancestor of the domesticated apple. The Russian explorer Peter Semenov was one of the first Europeans to document the Tian Shan extensively, in the 1850s, and he later changed his family name to refer to the mountains.
The eastern Tian Shan in China's Xinjiang was inscribed in 2013 and the western part in the three Central Asian countries in 2016. In 2023 the World Heritage Committee expressed its utmost concern that a substantial part of Sayram-Ugam National Nature Park in Kazakhstan had been moved out of the property into the buffer zone, and asked the three countries for a joint management plan.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).