URUMQI,
—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
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
She is one of hundreds of Bronze Age mummies discovered in the shifting desert sands of northwestern
they were preserved naturally by the elements, which in some ways makes
them more interesting. They represent an extended span of history from
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
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
The discovery turned on its head assumptions that
Caucasians didn’t frequent these parts until at least a thousand years
later, when trading between
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
“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
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
Their findings were confirmed by a more comprehensive study published
in February based on genetic tests of remains from a nearby
archeological site — Xiaohe (“
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
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
The mummies are also star attractions within
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
There was a man who lived in the third or fourth
century AD 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.
All the mummies tell a story. In an ancient
graveyard in Astana, near Turpan, a man and a woman are buried together
in an underground crypt that dates from the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-906)
and is one of the few places that the public can see mummies in their
original graves.
The woman looks younger than the man. Her mouth is
in a grimace; forensic specialists say her arm and neck were broken
shortly before her death. “We think she might have been beaten and
buried alive to be with her husband. He died naturally,” said Bai
Yingcai, a tour guide and mummy expert who was taking visitors through
the crypts.
Often, the mummies’ accessories are more interesting
than the bodies themselves. Some have high pointed hats; another,
possibly a healer, was buried with a bag of marijuana.
In one cemetery in Hami, in northeastern Xinjiang,
archaeologists found plaid fabric similar to what you’d see on a
Scottish kilt.
and a leading expert on ancient textiles, used the cloth to surmise
that the mummies shared Celtic ancestry with the Scots. In fact, the
cloth was almost the same as samples found in ancient salt mines in
Hallstatt,
Wang, the Chinese archaeologist, says people have
been too distracted by ethnic issues to focus on what the mummies can
teach about ancient lives: “You can study the mummies to learn what
these people ate, how they dressed, their social life, their standards
of beauty, how they interacted with others. This information is very
precious.”
The
beauty, despite her fine features, lived a hardscrabble life. Her shoes
and clothing had repeatedly been mended. Her hair was infested with
lice. She had ingested a considerable amount of sand, dust and
charcoal, and lung failure most likely caused her to die in her early
40s.
“You can see that even back then, pollution was a problem,” Wang said.
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