In December 2018, the local newspaper of Karamay released a special issue to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the oil city’s establishment. Although this outpost in China’s Central-Asian borderland is geographically distant from the megalopolises on the eastern coast, the discovery of a highly productive oilfield in the desert surrounding Karamay and the dramatic transformation of a once barren, hostile landscape into a flourishing garden city is a saga familiar to people across the country. Leafing through the historical photographs curated by the local newspaper, one can see that the epitome of Karamay in its early two decades was a giant construction site, on which drill pipes hauled from China proper were scattered around and teams of Han migrant workers bare-handedly chiseling out aqueducts and reservoirs. Uniformly dressed in the shapeless Mao suit, the Han migrant workers captured in the archival images were not individuals, but homogeneous entities subsumed to a combative proletariat class, showing no signs of fatigue or aversion to work. For the Chinese Communist Party, which has asserted an avant-garde leadership based upon the sociopolitical theories of Marxism, “labor power”—conceptualized in Capitol as an abstract and quantitative measure of the expenditure of human energy in production—is the locomotive of historical development and the premise of national revival. This chapter analyzes the Chinese state’s monumentalizing and museumification of Karamay’s oil industry, in which labor becomes a central locus for the racialization and hierarchization of different ethnic groups. The official narrative depicts the Han migrant workers as heroic civilizers who tamed a harsh frontier through industriousness and sacrifice—a manifestation of Chinese racial nationhood, while effectively erasing and marginalizing the historical presence and claims of Turkic-speaking ethnic groups who have inhabited the region for centuries before the demographic change engineered by the Chinese state. The contested social meanings ascribed to Karamay’s oil heritage illustrate oil’s complex interweaving with power, identity, and territoriality issues in China’s ethnic periphery.