Lop Lake (Uyghur: لوپنۇر; , also Lake Lop, in Mongol and Uyghur called Lop Nuur, or Lop Nur, ) is a group of small, now seasonal salt lake sand marshes between the Taklamakan and Kuruktag deserts in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, southeastern portion of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China.
The lake system into which the Tarim River and Shule River empty is the last remnant of the historical post-glacial Tarim Lake, which once covered more than in the Tarim Basin. Lop Nur is hydrologically endorheic—it is landbound and there is no outlet. Though it was determined to be a single salt lake by ancient Chinese geographers, the lake system has largely dried up from its 1928 measured area of and the desert has spread by windblown sandy loess. This has shifted the lake system westwards during the past 40 years. A partial cause for the destabilization of the desert has been the cutting of poplars and willows for firewood; in response, a reserve was established in 2003 to preserve of poplar.
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From around 1800 BCE until the 9th century the lake supported a thriving Tocharian culture. Archaeologists have discovered the buried remains of settlements, as well as several of the Tarim mummies, along its ancient shoreline. Former water resources of the Tarim River and Lop Nur nurtured the kingdom of Loulan since the second century BCE, an ancient civilization along the Silk Road, which skirted the lake-filled basin. Loulan became a client-state of the Chinese empire in 55 BCE, renamed Shanshan. Marco Polo passed near the lake, and the famous explorers Ferdinand von Richthofen, Nikolai Przhevalsky, Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein visited and studied the area. It is also likely that Swedish soldier Johan Gustaf Renat had visited the area when he was helping the Zunghars to produce maps over the area in the eighteenth century.
On June 17, 1980, Chinese archeologist Peng Jiamu disappeared while walking into Lop Nur in search of water. His body was never found, and his disappearance continues to be one of the most mysterious events in the history of Chinese archeology. On June 13, 1996, the Chinese explorer Yu Chunshun died while trying to walk across Lop Nur.
In 2010, construction started on a railway along the same route, which will facilitate taking the potassium-rich salt mined at the lake to the Lanxin Railway mainline.
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