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Genetic testing reveals awkward truth about Xinjiang’s famous mummiesM (AFP) 19 April 2005 URUMQI, China - After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. 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...

The Sand Dune Forgotten by Time Archaeologists working in the extreme desert terrain of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have moved a step closer to unraveling the mystery of a 40-century-old civilization. They unearthed 163 tombs containing mummies during their ongoing and long excavation at the mysterious Xiaohe tomb complex. And it's all thanks to the translation of a diary kept by a Swedish explorer more than 70 years ago. "We have found more than 30 coffins containing mummies," said Idelisi Abuduresule, head of the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute and the excavation team. The complex is believed to...

China unearths ancient Caucasian tombs AFP October 25, 2004 BEIJING: Chinese archaeologists have started unearthing hundreds of tombs in an arid north-western region once home to a mysterious civilization that most likely was Caucasian, state media said Sunday. The researchers have begun work at Xiaohe, near the Lop Nur desert in Xinjiang region, where an estimated 1000 tombs await excavation, according to Xinhua news agency. Their findings could help shed light on one of the greatest current archaeological riddles and answer the question of how this isolated culture ended up thousands of kilometres from the nearest Caucasian community. The tombs,...

Ancient European remains discovered in Qinghai www.chinaview.cn 2004-07-06 15:32:53 XINING, July 6 (Xinhuanet) -- Archeologists confirmed that the human skeletons discovered this May in northwest China's Qinghai Province belonged to three Europeans who lived in China over 1,900 years ago. "The physical characteristics of the bones showed it is a typical European race," said Wang Minghui, an expert with the archeological institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The skeletons were spotted at Zhongchuan Town of the province's eastern most Minhe Hui and Tu Autonomous County. Since 2002, archeologists have unearthed nine tombs of Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD)...

THE CURSE OF THE RED-HEADED MUMMY5-18-2001 by Heather Pringle Until he first encountered the mummies of Xinjiang, Victor Mair was known mainly as a brilliant, if eccentric, translator of obscure Chinese texts, a fine sinologist with a few controversial ideas about the origins of Chinese culture, and a scathing critic prone to penning stern reviews of sloppy scholarship. Mair's pronouncements on the striking resemblance between some characters inscribed on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Chinese symbols were intensely debated by researchers. His magnum opus on the origins of Chinese writing, a work he had been toiling away at for...

China Discovers Cross-Border Tunnels Leading to Xinjiang, North Korea Images from a Chinese satellite show cross-border tunnels in sensitive regions. By Shannon Tiezzi August 26, 2014 In April 2013, China launched Gaofen-1, its first high-definition earth observation satellite (Gaofen-2 was launched just last week, on August 19). This week, China’s National Space Administration reported that Gaofen-1 had captured images showing “dozens of cross-border tunnels” in northwest Xinjiang and along the China-North Korea border. It’s unclear exactly what the tunnels are used for, but Chinese media tied their existence to previous reports on illegal China-North Korea border crossings, as well as...

MIRAMSHAH: At least 73 suspected local and foreign militants were killed in a series of pre-dawn air strikes on hideouts and bases in North Waziristan and in a later clash following an attack on security personnel. An army major and three other security personnel died in the clash. The targets of the air strikes were strongholds of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (Etim) — a militant outfit comprising largely Turkic-speaking militants from Uzbekistan and Uighurs from China’s north-western autonomous region of Xinjiang, a security official said. China has blamed Etim, which also uses the name of Turkistan Islamic Party, for...

Dozens Injured in Blast in Capital of China's Xinjiang Region At Least 50 Injured in Explosion at Train Station, Local Media Report By James T. Areddy Updated April 30, 2014 10:03 a.m. ET A blast injured dozens Wednesday evening at a train station in the capital city of northwestern China's Xinjiang region, where President Xi Jinping traveled this week with a pledge to strike hard at terrorists. The explosion occurred at 7 p.m. and ambulances were rushing injured to the hospital, the People's Daily official government newspaper said in a post on its verified social media feed. The newspaper later...

BORDEAUX, Burgundy… Xinjiang. The world's wine map may have to be significantly re-drawn with figures showing more than a glass is being raised to China. Such is the pace of wine consumption in China that last year the country produced more than 700 million bottles with new statistics showing that production will outstrip Australia's by 2009. Supermarket chain Morrisons has already added two wines ADVERTISEMENT from the north-west of China to its portfolio, while London fine wine merchants Berry Brothers & Rudd (BBR) has predicted that, by 2058, China will have all the essential ingredients to make fine wine to...

Traditionally, the Uighur separatists aren’t the sort to seek attention. Dwelling primarily in the mountains of Xinjiang Province in northwest China, they don’t maintain an active social media presence like the Taliban or al-Qaeda. They almost never post videos boasting of exploits. But over the last two weeks, amid so-far unsubstantiated speculation the Uighurs had some involvement in the disappearance of MH370, the Turkic-speaking Muslim group has gained greater international notoriety than perhaps ever before. :snip: The Uighur emergence began on March 1 when a group of them wielding knives stormed a train station in southern China and stabbed to...

Terrorism: Six hijackers were in for a surprise last week when they tried to commandeer a Tianjin Airlines jet bound for Urumqi, China. The passengers overpowered the gang, apparently killing two, and averted disaster. Seems "let's roll" translates very well into Chinese. In this case, the language was Uighur, the language of China's restive western state of Xinjiang, where an Islamic separatist movement with some links to al-Qaida has been active. Last Friday, in the city of Hotan, six ethnic Uighurs aged 26 to 30, rose from their seats after takeoff, three in front and three in back, and tried...

Hong Kong (CNN) -- A connection to Xinjiang, a restive autonomous region in northwestern China, has emerged in the investigation into the jeep that plowed into crowds in Tiananmen Square on Monday, killing five and injuring at least 40. The incident, which has been identified as a terrorist attack, was "carefully planned, organized and premeditated," police said Wednesday on their official Weibo account online. Tuesday, police circulated a notice to hotels in Beijing related to a "major incident" listing names that suggested suspects belonged to the Uyghur ethnic group that comes from Xinjiang. The region has a long history of...

BEIJING (AP) -- A tense minority region in China's far west erupted in violence Friday for the second time in three days, barely hours after the government called the earlier unrest a "terrorist attack" and raised the death toll to 35. State media gave few details in a brief dispatch about Friday's unrest, saying it was "a violent attack" that took place on a pedestrian street in Hotan, a city in Xinjiang, a region that has seen China's minority Uighurs clash with the ethnic Han majority. No details on casualties were released.

Recent Chinese diplomatic maneuvers in Central Asia, both bilateral and multilateral, show that Beijing’s strategy treats the region as a corridor for reaching resource bases in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa. Central Asia is thus part of China’s broader blueprint of securing strategic resources and supplies to feed its developing economy (Z. Saipov, China Oil & Gas Monitor, Week 21, Issue 396, News Base, May 31, p. 3–4). Hu Jintao (L) and Islam Karimov Illustratively, Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu’s two-week official tour of Congo, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan on September 1–13 (English.sina.com, September 6) supports the premise that...

China has detained and intimidated dozens of ethnic Uighurs in the far western region of Xinjiang for speaking out on rights abuses following riots in the regional capital three years ago, Amnesty International said. In July 2009, the capital city of Urumqi was rocked by violence between majority Han Chinese and minority Uighurs that killed nearly 200 people. Many of the Muslim Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and call Xinjiang home, chafe at Beijing's rule. Since then, China has executed nine people it accused of instigating the riots, detained and prosecuted hundreds and ramped up spending on security, according...

China typically exercises caution when making public statements about terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. When China blames attacks on Pakistan-based terrorist organizations, such as the possibly defunct East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), it risks adding tensions to the Sino-Pakistani “all-weather” friendship. [1] However, when China blames attacks on local Uyghurs it is tantamount to an admission that its policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have not created a “harmonious society.” Zhou Yongkang (left), member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), shakes hands with a local Uygur farmer...

It has been a difficult summer for Red China’s restive western province Xinjiang. A series of incidents characterized as terrorism have struck two of the province’s cities, causing death, destruction and ethnic tension. This picture was further complicated when the government of the city of Kashgar published a statement online that claimed at least one of the perpetrators had been trained in Pakistan (Xinhua, August 1). The allegation by Communist Chinese officials cast a shadow over Sino-Pakistani relations, a bilateral relationship that had been characterized in Kashgar just the month before by Pakistani Ambassador to China Masood Khan as “higher...

China pointed a finger at Pakistan, one of its closest foreign partners, as it blamed one of two deadly attacks over the weekend in the northwestern Xinjiang region on Muslim extremists trained across the Pakistani border.‬ Police also "executed on the spot" two more suspected attackers in the city of Kashgar, according to a local government statement, while paramilitary police with shotguns and automatic weapons patrolled the streets to prevent further unrest. Local authorities said 20 people were killed in all in the attacks by knife-wielding members of the Uighur ethnic minority on Saturday and Sunday in the second week...

China blames extremists for Xinjiang attack China says a group led by militants trained in Pakistan was behind Sunday's attack in Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region. In a statement on the Internet, the government in Kashgar says a suspect detained after the attack told police that the leaders of their group belong to a separatist organization called the "East Turkistan Islamic Movement." They reportedly learned how to make explosives in Pakistan before carrying out Sunday's attack. On Sunday night, a group of attackers stabbed people on the streets of Kashgar, killing 6 people and injured 15. Five suspects...

Knife-wielding attackers killed 10 people in ChinaÂ’s Xinjiang region and another four were shot dead by police as a wave of violence swept the ethnically-torn area, state media and officials said on Sunday. The unrest occurred in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar in two separate attacks, and local residents said on Sunday the city centre was under lockdown, with security forces patrolling the streets. Xinjiang has seen several outbreaks of ethnic violence in recent years as the mainly Muslim Uyghur minority bridles under what it regards as oppression by the government and the unwanted immigration of ethnic Han...