Karamay or Karamai (Uyghur: قاراماي, Qaramay, K̡aramay; Chinese: 克拉瑪依; pinyin: Kèlāmǎyī, Wae-Giles: K'o-la-ma-i) is a prefecture-level city in the north of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, in northwestern China. Karamay comes from the Uyghur language, and means "black oil". Karamay was the site of one of the worst disasters in modern Chinese history, the 12/8/94 incident, when 324 people, 288 of them school children, lost their lives in a cinema fire on 8 December 1994. Population (2002): 290,000.