As I wrote before, the Heavenly mountain range divides Xinjiang into two, the lush Northern part and the South which is a large swathe of desert. The olden inhabitants just bury their dead in the desert and after thousands of years, some has been discovered, in very well preserved states of mummification. The Pharaohs in Egypt has been chemically mummified but not these in the desert of the Tarim Basin. They were just wrapped up and buried. One of them which archaeologists called 'LouLan' was carefully studied, they did a digital reconstruction of her and found that she was an Indo-Eurasian looking woman and very attractive. She was a beauty and the name given her stuck, she became known as 'LouLan beauty.' The Australian couple, having seen a documentary about the discovery of 'LouLan beauty' decided to come to Urumqi to see her. This was what they and we found, 'LouLan beauty' was not where she was supposed to be. She's traveling, on loan to a museum in Shenzhen in the South.
LouLan beauty would be in repose here except she's traveling. She wasn't home at the time of our visit.
The corpse of a Chinese General, they covered his genital area out of respect.
The mummies were in this terrific state of preservatio, hair and skin being intact. Their woolen blanket was like it was thousands of years ago, the color is still intact. One can still see the tattoos on the face of the old lady in the red blanket. This is truly amazing.
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