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Read this excellent book by a textile/fabric expert:

The Mummies Of Urumchi - Brief Article - EX
Natural History, July, 1999 by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

From THE MUMMIES OF URUMCHI by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Copyright [C] 1999 by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.

With their high-bridged noses, deep round eye sockets, and fair hair, the ancient mummies found in the Tarim Basin in central Asia bear little resemblance to the Turkic or Mongol residents of the region today.

The woman from Qawrighul (Gumugou, in Chinese) lies in state in the first case of the mummy gallery in the museum at Urumchi, capital of the remote Chinese-administered region known as Xinjiang and some sixteen hundred miles west of Beijing. She is bundled up in a brown woolen wrap with funerary gifts surrounding her. Buried between 2000 and 1800 B.C. (the era of Abraham and the patriarchs), she is one of the earliest mummies exhumed from China's Tarim Basin, toward the eastern end of the egg-shaped Taklimakan Desert between Mongolia in the north and Tibet in the south. Framed by auburn hair, her face looks so peaceful and hauntingly beautiful that she is nicknamed the Beauty of Loulan. A painting by a local artist of how she probably looked when alive adorns wall posters and the CD covers of recordings by local Turkic musicians.

She is scarcely closer to Turkic in her anthropological type than she is to Han Chinese. The body and facial forms associated with Turks and Mongols began to appear in the Tarim cemeteries only in the first millennium B.C., fifteen hundred years after this woman lived. But the local inhabitants do have a good reason to think of these mummies as among their ancestors, for a noticeable number of the non-Chinese people living in Xinjiang today have blue eyes and light brown or reddish hair, a legacy of old intermarriages with the ancient early arrivals from the west, who lost their linguistic and cultural--but not genetic--identity a thousand years ago in the rising tide of people entering from the north and east.

The artifacts around this woman tell us much. Her crude, ankle-high moccasins consist of leather with the fur on the outside, while her midi-length skirt has the fur turned inward for warmth. Her knee-length overwrap, secured with a wooden pin, is woven of sheep's wool and constructed with extra weft. Thousands of long loops on the surface further insulate the wearer.

The hoodlike woolen cap alone tells many tales. To make it, the woman started by felting blond wool over two pieces of dark brown woven cloth. We know the cloth came from two sources, because on the left side, both warp and weft are spun in the same direction, whereas half the threads in the right-hand cloth are spun the opposite way. The hat's edging, a cord plaited of red and probably blue yarns, gives us our one and only indicator that she and her people already knew how to dye wool. She finished off her headgear by sticking a large straight feather into it. The woman also has a soft, neatly woven wheat basket and a winnowing tray, which, like her woolen clothing and Caucasian features, demonstrate yet again the western origins of these early Central Asian cultures. Together they show that the migration of these westerners must have come later than 4000 B.C., by which time the peoples of the Fertile Crescent were breeding woolly sheep and cultivating large-grained varieties of wheat.

Today the area around Qawrighul is desert, spreading across the terraced hills north of an intermittently flowing river sometimes called the Qum-darya (Sand or Sandy River). The Turkic name of the range, Quruk-Tagh, says it well: it means "dry mountains." Investigations into recorded Chinese history show that two thousand years ago, a city thrived somewhere in the Loulan area, a vital link in the trade route from China to the Roman Empire the so-called Silk Road across central Asia. This city, known as Loulan Station, sat near the shore of a large shallow lake that received vast amounts of water from the Tarim River and its sometime tributary the Konqi. Together these two rivers drained the meltwater from most of the mountain ranges that ring the Tarim Basin.

But one dreadful day in about A.D. 330, storms and flooding pushed the river's course far south across the flatlands, stranding the bustling city of Loulan and creating a new and smaller lake far away. Its water gone, Loulan died, along with its trees and other vegetation. Marco Polo knew of no lake in the northern zone in 1273, only, as one scholar put it, "the desert of Lop, in which he heard voices of ghosts speaking and out of whose depth there seemed to him to come the beating of drums--the howling of the sandstorms."