2010 China drought and dust storms the drought, including a three-day tour in mid-March in Yunnan, including Luliang County, which had seen no rainfall since August, to promote water conservation, and another visit in early April 2010 to several Miao and Buyei Autonomous Prefectures in Guizhou, some of the worst-hit places where farming has been made impossible. Most provinces in South China affected by the drought were hit by a series of floods beginning in mid-May that ended most of the drought but also destroyed large areas of farmland. Strong dust storms from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia hit Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shanxi,
Gobi Desert antelopes and wild camels, which frequent its few small, widely scattered oases. The vegetation, which is confined to these same relatively favoured spots, is of the scantiest and is mainly confined to bushes of saxaul "(Haloxylon)", "anabasis", reeds (kamish), tamarisks, poplars, and Ephedra. The Gobi had a long history of human habitation, mostly by nomadic peoples. By the early 20th century, the region was under the nominal control of Manchu-China, and inhabited mostly by Mongols, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs. The Gobi Desert as a whole was known only very imperfectly to outsiders, and information was confined to observations by individual travellers