Karamay is a prefecture-level city in the north of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China. It is surrounded on all sides by Tacheng Prefecture. The name of the city comes from the Uyghur language and means "black oil", referring to the oil fields near the city. Karamay was the site of one of the worst disasters in modern Chinese history, the 1994 Karamay fire, when 324 people, including 288 school children, lost their lives in a cinema fire on 8 December 1994.