Jengish Chokusu

Where is Jengish Chokusu?

Jengish Chokusu is part of the Kakshaal Too, Tian Shan.

You will find it in: Kyrgyzstan.

Summit: 42.038° N, 80.125° E

The story behind it

Its Kyrgyz name means Victory Summit, and the Russian name Pik Pobedy says exactly the same thing. In Chinese and Uyghur the mountain is Tomur, or Tömür, a word for iron. For a long time nobody realised how big it was: a survey in 1943 finally showed that it stands higher than its famous neighbour Khan Tengri. The first ascent that everyone accepts was made in 1956 by a rope team around Vitaly Abalakov. Because the peak lies so far north, the air is colder here than on mountains of the same height in Nepal, and storms can settle in for days. Its prominence of 4 148 metres, the drop to the lowest saddle linking it to anything taller, is one of the twenty biggest in the world. The summit ridge sits right on the border with China, so one boot can be in Kyrgyzstan and the other in Xinjiang.

Find it on the globe

Jengish Chokusu is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.