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.

[5] 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.

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.

), 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.

[16] 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,"[17] Carruthers quotes the British journalist and MP, Morgan Philips Price, with whom he travelled:[18]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.

After 1761 its territory fell mostly to the Qing dynasty (Xinjiang and north-western Mongolia) and partly to Russian Turkestan (earlier the Kazakh state provinces of Semirechye- Jetysu and Irtysh river).

Due to the Sino-Soviet Split, the border town remained a sleepy backwater for some 30 years, until the Alashankou railway station was finally completed on September 12, 1990.

[22] The Dzungarian Gate has been noted in modern history as the most convenient pass for horseback riders between the western Eurasian steppe and lands further east, and for its fierce and almost constant winds.

The Greek writer Herodotus writes in his Histories (4.13) that the explorer Aristeas, a native of Proconnesus in Asia Minor active circa 7th century BC, had written a hexameter poem (now lost) about a journey to the Issedones of the far north.

This Aristeas, possessed by Phoibos, visited the Issedones; beyond these live the one-eyed Arimaspoi, beyond whom are the Grypes that guard gold, and beyond these again the Hyperboreoi, whose territory reaches to the sea.

Following Bolton's location of the Issedones on the south-western slopes of the Altay Mountains, Ruck places Hyperborea beyond the Dzungarian Gate into northern Xinjiang.

The griffin (Greek: γρύφων, grýphōn), a legendary creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle,[30] is a common heraldic theme of Central Asia.

[31] According to modern theory, the griffin was an ancient misconception derived from fossilized remains of the Protoceratops found in conjunction with gold mining in the mountains of Scythia, present day eastern Kazakhstan.

According to Mayor and Dodson the association of the Dzungarian Gate with gold and griffin (Protoceratops) skeletons spanned a thousand years of classical history:[35]The second-century A.D. Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy and ancient Chinese sources agree in locating the issedonians along the old trade routes from China to the West, from the western Gobi desert to the Dzungarian (or Junggarian) Gate, the mountain pass between modern Kazakhstan and north-western China.

Recent linguistic and archaeological studies confirm that Greek and Roman trade with Saka-Scythian nomads flourished in that region from Aristeas's day to about A.D. 300—exactly the period during which griffins were most prominently featured in Greco-Roman art and literature.

[37][38] Ildikó Lehtinen writes that "the story of the cave of the stormwinds somewhere near the Dzungarian Gate" has been known for 2500 years, by travelers from Aristeas in the classic era, to Giovanni di Piano Carpini in the Middle Ages (before Marco Polo), and to Gustaf John Ramstedt in the 20th century.

[42] The Greeks believed that Boreas's home was in Thrace, and Herodotus and Pliny both describe a northern land known as Hyperborea ("Beyond the North Wind"), where people lived in complete happiness and had extraordinarily long lifespans.