URUMQI, China --Almost invariably when visitors approach the middle-aged woman enshrined in a climatized exhibit case in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Museum, they pause and do a double take. What gets the most attention is her nose: high-bridged, slightly hooked, the sort of nose that reminds you of Meryl Streep.Then a little gasp. "Weiguoren!" (A foreigner!), one young woman exclaimed to her friends.
Nearly 4,000 years after her death, the so-called Beauty of Loulan still has the ability to amaze.
She is one of hundreds of Bronze Age mummies discovered in the shifting desert sands of northwestern China's Xinjiang region, where thousands more still lie buried. Unlike the embalmed mummies of ancient Egypt, they were preserved naturally by the elements. They represent an extended span of history from 1800 B.C. to as recently as the Ching dynasty (1644-1912) and a range of human experience. Some were kings and warriors, others housewives and farmers.
"They were ordinary people who lived and died in Xinjiang over the ages," said Wang Binghua, a retired archaeologist who exhumed many of the mummies.
The most famous of them, the Beauty of Loulan, was unearthed in 1980 by Chinese archaeologists working with a crew on a film about the Silk Road near Lop Nur, a dried salt lake 120 miles from Urumqi that's been used by the Chinese for nuclear testing.
Thanks to the extreme dryness and the preservative properties of salt, the corpse was remarkably intact -- her eyelashes, the fine hair on her skin, even the lines on her skin were visible. She was buried face up about 3 feet under, wrapped in a simple woolen cloth and dressed in a goatskin, a felt hat and leather shoes.
But what was most remarkable about the corpse -- believed to date to about 1,800 B.C. -- was that she appeared to be Caucasian, with her telltale large nose, narrow jaw and reddish-brown hair.
The discovery turned on its head assumptions that Caucasians didn't frequent these parts until at least a thousand years later, when trading between Europe and Asia began along the Silk Road. And it added another bone of contention to the raging ethnic conflict in Xinjiang, where Uighurs, a Turkic speaking people, consider themselves the indigenous population and the Han Chinese foreign invaders. Since Uighurs themselves often resemble Europeans rather than Chinese, many were quick to adopt the Beauty of Loulan as one of their own.
"If you went to see the mummy in the museum, a Uighur would come up to you and whisper proudly, 'She's our ancestor,'" said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "It became a political hot potato."
For years, the Chinese government tried to thwart foreign scholars from looking too deeply into the mummies' origins. In 1993, the government confiscated tissue samples from Xinjiang mummies that Mair and an Italian geneticist, Paolo Francalacci, had collected with permission. (A Chinese scientist, whom Mair declines to name, later slipped the samples into their hands as they were preparing to leave.)
Although DNA testing was not as advanced as it is today, the scientists were able to trace a genetic link to Europe. Their findings were confirmed by a more comprehensive study published in February based on genetic tests of remains from a nearby archeological site -- Xiaohe ("Small River"), which lies about 100 miles west of Loulan. Geneticists from China's Jilin and Fudan universities concluded that the ancestors of these ancient people had indeed come from Europe, possibly by way of Siberia.
The mummies were not Chinese, but they weren't Uighur either -- although their descendents might have eventually been assimilated into the Uighur population, according to Mair, who consulted on that study. "We deflated that bubble," he said.
The result is that the mummies have shed some of their political sensitivity, allowing them to come out of the closet of China's ethnic troubles. For the first time this year, two mummies traveled to the United States as part of an exhibit titled "Secrets of the Silk Road: Mystery Mummies of China" at Santa Ana's Bowers Museum. The show is now at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where it will remain until early next year, when it travels to the University of Pennsylvania.
The mummies are also star attractions within China, the centerpiece of the recently refurbished museum in Urumqi, and another in the oasis town of Turpan, 140 miles from Urumqi, where ethnic Chinese mummies discovered in the region are on display.
Although the terrain nowadays is so dry and wind-swept as to be almost uninhabitable, this area known as the Tarim Basin was once laced with rivers and dotted with oases hospitable enough for settlement. As a crossroads between Europe and Asia, it was home at different times to an astonishing mix of peoples -- Europeans, Siberians, Mongolians, Han Chinese.
There was a man who lived in the third or fourth century A.D. who was 6 feet 6 and dressed in magnificent red and gold embroidered clothing; a 3-month-old baby (eighth century) with a felt bonnet and small blue stones covering the eyes, which were possibly the same color. Some of the men have red beards; the women have long blond braids.
Source:Barbara Demick Los Angeles Times
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