The Beauty of Loulan mummy 1800 BCE

September 18, 2023

The Beauty of Loulan mummy 1800 BCE

"Then a little gasp. “Weiguoren!” (A foreigner!), one young woman exclaimed to her friends. They were touring the museum earlier this month on a Chinese public holiday. 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, which in some ways makes them more interesting. They represent an extended span of history dating from 1800 BC 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 who were working with a television crew on a film about the Silk Road near Lop Nur, a dried salt lake 120 miles from Urumqi that has 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 BC — 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."

-Cultural Exchange: China’s surprising Bronze Age mummies. Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times