It occupies a V-shaped basin between the Dzungarian Alatau in the northwest and the Borohoro Mountains in the southwest.

In addition, it is home to the Fifth Agricultural Division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and its 11 regiment-level farms / ranches.

According to the 2010 census, 65% of the 443,680 inhabitants are Han Chinese, while the remainder are Mongol, Uyghur, Kazakh, Hui or of other nationalities.

[3] In 2004 the prefecture had a total gross domestic product of 3.69 billion Renminbi (including the XPCC 5th division), an increase of 11.9% over the previous year.

The volume of imports / exports passing through Alashankou accounts for 90% of the total for all of Xinjiang, and has been second to only Manzhouli, Inner Mongolia among land ports-of-entry in China for 8 days.