Kokdala
A grassland town in the Ili valley, Kokdala is where the lyrical song Night on the Grassland was born and first sung.
A place shaped through time
Kokdala lies in the Ili River valley of the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, about twenty kilometres from Yining, with Tianshan ranges and grasslands along the valley sides. In 1958 the documentary Green Fields was filmed here, and its song Night on the Grassland spread far beyond the valley, later called the Serenade of the East. The moist Ili valley is one of the best-watered parts of Xinjiang, where grassland, fields and shelterbelts alternate across the valley floor. National Highway 312 and the Jinghe–Khorgos railway pass nearby, linking it with Yining and Khorgos. A song about a night on the grassland made the name of this stretch of the valley widely known.