Strange discovery: European mummies found in Taklamakan Desert, Xinjiang

But, as the desert’s name suggests, she never emerged. One of the women who shares her grave has light brown hair that looks like it was brushed and braided yesterday, for her funeral. Her face is adorned with painted symbols and her magnificent red funeral dress has lost none of its luster over the three millennia during which this tall, fine-featured woman has rested beneath the sands of the Silk Road.

The bodies are much better preserved than the Egyptian mummies, and there is something poignant about the sight of the babies. The baby was wrapped in a rich brown cloth tied with red and blue cords, and a blue stone was placed over each eye. Beside him was a bottle with a nipple made from a sheep’s udder.

The museum has reconstructed the appearance of the Cherchen Man and his way of life from the mummy. The similarities with the Celts of the traditional Bronze Age are striking. Analysis also showed that the weave of the textiles was comparable to that of the clothing worn by salt miners living in Austria in 1300 BC.

By 300 BC, Celtic influence had spread from Ireland to southern Spain in the west, to the Po River, Poland, Ukraine and the central Turkish plain in the east. However, these mummies seem to indicate that the Celts had pushed into Central Asia, reaching the Tibetan steppes. Between 500 and 100 BC, the Celts finally settled in Brittany (today Great Britain). We cannot speak precisely of an organised invasion, as they occurred in several periods and are thought to be a loosely connected group of people sharing the same language, religion and culture. The Cherchens appear to have been a peaceful people, as their graves contained few weapons and there was little indication of class. The Beauty of Loulan is much older than the Cherchen discoveries, dating back 4,000 years. She is one of many mummies unearthed in the village of Loulan and had long, blonde hair. One was the mummy of an eight-year-old boy wrapped in a woollen robe with bone uttons. Scandinavian beauty traits characterise Loulan. She died at the age of 45 and was buried with a basket containing wheat, combs and a feather to sustain her in the afterlife.

Hundreds of dehydrated bodies have been discovered in the Taklamakan Desert over the past quarter century. The finds uncovered in the Tarim Basin are among the most important of the past quarter century. “By 1800 BC-1800 AD, the earliest mummies from the Tarim Basin are entirely Caucasoid,” says Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, who has been drawn to these mummies ever since he discovered them, virtually forgotten, in the back chamber of the ancient museum in 1988. He has stopped at nothing, not even the darkest political entanglements, to discover more and more about these extraordinary individuals. He maintains that migrants from East Asia arrived in the eastern parts of the Tarim Basin some three thousand years ago.

In China, it is traditionally said that, two centuries before the birth of Christ, Emperor Wu Di sent an emissary to the West in order to establish an alliance against the Huns, then established in Mongolia.

The route taken by Zhang Qian, the ambassador, through Asia later became the Silk Road. Centuries later, Marco Polo took the opposite path and began the opening of China. The very idea that whites could have settled in an area of China thousands of years before Wu Di’s first contacts with the West and Marco Polo’s travels has far-reaching political consequences. As for the fact that these Europeans would have lived in the restive province of Xinjiang hundreds of years before East Asians, that is an explosive hypothesis.

Ji Xianlin, a Chinese historian, in his preface to archaeologist Wang Binhua’s book The Ancient Tombs of Xinjiang, translated by Mair, says that China “supports and admires” foreign specialists’ research on mummies. “However, in China itself, a small group of ethnic separatists have seized this opportunity to stir up trouble and are behaving like buffoons. Some present themselves as descendants of these ancient “whites” and have no other aim than to divide the motherland. But such evil acts are doomed to failure.”

It is therefore not surprising that the government has been slow to report these important historical finds, for fear of stirring up separatist currents in Xinjiang. The Beauty of Loulan is thus claimed by the Uighurs, who have made her their emblematic figure, celebrated with songs and portraits.

But genetic tests now show that he was actually European. In total, there are 400 mummies in various states of desiccation and decomposition. Added to this are thousands of skulls. There is something about mummies that keeps scientists busy for a long time.