White Mummies in China▕ March of the Titans Perfectly preserved 3000-year-old mummies have been unearthed in a remote Chinese desert, shedding new light on the contact between the East and West in the ancient world. But these don't appear to be the ancestors of the modern-day Chinese people, they have long, blonde hair and blue eyes. New evidence of the lost civilization of the Tocharians along the Silk Road offers more clues to this mystery from the past. The Tocharians: the Great Lost White migration to China. The Chinese civilization always contained stories of blue-eyed and blonde-haired leaders who were the originators of Buddhism and who were the first leaders and organizers of Chinese society. These stories were always regarded as pure legend until the 1977 discovery of the graveyards of the Tocharians in the Takla Makan desert in China. The Tocharian mummies - naturally preserved in the dry desert sands are unequivocally clear Nordic racial types. The graveyards lie near the ruins of the great Tocharian cities, built along the famous Silk Route. It is beyond doubt that Whites settled in China, and the Chinese legends of White influence on that civilization may yet have some basis in fact Song: General Lü General Lü, The valiant-hearted, Riding alone on Scarlet Hare, Out of the gates of Ch'in, To weep at Gold Grain Mound By funeral trees. Inscrutable that vaulted azure, Arching over earth, This is the way the world wags In our Nine Provinces. Gleaming ore from Scarlet Hill! Hero of our time! Green-eyed general, you well know The will of Heaven! After years of controversy and political intrigue,the research, which the Chinese government has attempted to postpone , archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China's Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. 2004 study carried out by Jilin University also finding that the mummies DNA had white European genes, further proving that the earliest settlers of Western China were not East Asians but European. The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades. "It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it has created a lot of difficulties," Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of "Mummies of the Tarim Basin", told AFP. "It would be better for everyone to approach this from a purely scientific and historical perspective." The discoveries in the 1980s of the undisturbed 4,000-year-old "Beauty of Loulan" and the younger 3,000-year-old body of the "Charchan Man" are legendary in world archaeological circles for the fine state of their preservation and for the wealth of knowledge they bring to modern research. In historic and scientific circles the discoveries along the ancient Silk Road were on a par with finding the Egyptian mummies. But China's concern over its rule in restive Xinjiang has widely been perceived as impeding faster research into them and greater publicity of the findings. The desiccated corpses, which avoided natural decomposition due to the dry atmosphere and alkaline soils in the Tarim Basin, have not only given scientists a look into their physical biologies, but their clothes, tools and burial rituals have given historians a glimpse into life in the Bronze Age. Mair, who played a pivotal role in bringing the discoveries to Western scholars in the 1990s, has worked tirelessly to get Chinese approval to take samples out of China for definitive genetic testing. "I spent six months in Sweden last year doing nothing but genetic research," Mair said from his home in the United States where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. "My research has shown that in the second millennium BC, the oldest mummies, like the Loulan Beauty, were the earliest settlers in the Tarim Basin. "From the evidence available, we have found that during the first 1,000 years after the Loulan Beauty, the only settlers in the Tarim Basin were Caucasoid." East Asian peoples only began showing up in the eastern portions of the Tarim Basin about 3,000 years ago, Mair said, while the Uighur peoples arrived after the collapse of the Orkon Uighur Kingdom, largely based in modern day Mongolia, around the year 842. "Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Krygyzs, the peoples of Central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story," he said.

• published: 22 Sep 2013
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