1. Taklamakan Desert (Xinjiang, China), the snow-covered desert

Taklamakan is one of the largest sand deserts in the world, ranking 15th in size out of the world's largest non-polar deserts. It covers 337,600 square kilometers of the Tarim Basin, and is 1,000 kilometers long by 400 kilometers wide. As travelers sought to avoid the arid wasteland of the desert, they etched out two branches of the Silk Road at its northern and southern edges. In 2008, a heavy 11-day snow covered the desert and transformed it into a white world.