  This study presents a general outline of the Qitai radio telescope (QTT)
project. Qitai, the site of the telescope, is a county of Xinjiang Uygur
Autonomous Region of China, located in the east Tianshan Mountains at an
elevation of about 1800 m. The QTT is a fully steerable, Gregorian type
telescope with a standard parabolic main reflector of 110 m diameter. The QTT
has adopted an um-brella support, homology-symmetric lightweight design. The
main reflector is active so that the deformation caused by gravity can be
corrected. The structural design aims to ultimately allow high-sensitivity
observations from 150 MHz up to 115 GHz. To satisfy the requirements for early
scientific goals, the QTT will be equipped with ultra-wideband receivers and
large field-of-view mul-ti-beam receivers. A multi-function signal-processing
system based on RFSoC and GPU processor chips will be developed. These will
enable the QTT to operate in pulsar, spectral line, continuum and Very Long
Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) observing modes. Electromagnetic compatibility
(EMC) and radio frequency interference (RFI) control techniques are adopted
throughout the system design. The QTT will form a world-class observational
platform for the detection of low-frequency (nanoHertz) gravitational waves
through pulsar timing array (PTA) techniques, pulsar surveys, the discovery of
binary black-hole systems, and exploring dark matter and the origin of life in
the universe.
