© Barbara Demick/LA Times
Visitors look at the "Beauty of Loulan" at the museum in Urumqi.
Visitors look at the "Beauty of Loulan" at the museum in Urumqi.
The most remarkable thing about the 'Beauty of Loulan' and the rest? They appear to be of ancient Caucasians. They were found in an area of China that was a crossroads between Asia and Europe.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. 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.
