Penn Museum

Loulan is the fabled city near the vanished Lop Nor (“Lop Lake”) that lay in the northeastern corner of the Tarim Basin. The Beauty of Loulan is a comely woman who was among the first mummies to be discovered in the region. She has been dated to about 1800 BCE. Shortly after she was found in the late 1970s, she became a cause célèbre among the local Turkic-speaking Uyghur people who considered her their ancestor, which they believed gave them a prior claim to the region over the Han Chinese, who arrived about 2,000 years later.

Unfortunately, the Uyghurs themselves did not arrive in the Tarim Basin until nearly a millennium after the Han Chinese. Thus, the Beauty of Loulan embodies one of the many mysteries about the mummies, namely, if she were neither a Sinitic-speaking Chinese nor a Turkic-speaking Uyghur, what language did she speak? Evidence exists indicating she may well have spoken Tocharian, the second oldest (after Hittite) Indo-European language.

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Yingpan is located along an ancient caravan trail to the west of Turfan. Judging from his clothing and accessories, Yingpan Man must have been fabulously wealthy and is surely to be counted among the best dressed men of antiquity. Nearly 6’ 6” tall, Yingpan Man’s face is covered by a white mask with a strip of gold foil across the forehead. Yingpan Man’s amazing outfit, with its Greco-Roman motifs (including putti or cherubs and bulls with laurel wreaths around their midsection) and extravagant embroidery, marks him as a man of far-reaching connections.

Although his seriously decomposed body no longer lies within its sartorial shell, we know from earlier descriptions that he was a Caucasoid with brown hair. Considering his riches, international aura, and the strategic trading spot where he was buried, it is possible that Yingpan Man was a Sogdian merchant from a group of Middle Iranian people who were traders par excellence throughout Eurasia.