Dabancheng wind farm’s location in a natural wind tunnel in China’s Xinjiang province makes it one of the best situated in the world. It is also a showcase for the turbine manufacturer Goldwind, which became the largest supplier in the world after installing so much turbine capacity in 2015 that it overtook Vestas of Denmark.

Wu Gang, Goldwind’s founder and chairman, sweeps his hands gracefully to show how the wind courses through the narrow corridor between the Junggar basin and the Taklamakan desert, where Marco Polo wrote of hearing the voice of a genie calling from the whirlwinds.

Today more than 300 towers rise from the dusty desert floor, churned by that constant wind. Dabancheng is an engineer’s heaven, studded with prototypes of nearly every generation of turbine technology, both Chinese-made and foreign. “I joke when I’m in Europe — I tell young people who want to know the history of European windpower technology to come to Dabancheng,” Mr Wu says.