Loulan Beauty

In Xinjiang Museum, there is a mummy exhibition hall for the mummies excavated in Xinjiang. Particularly the Loulan Beauty who was discovered in 1980, died 3800 years ago on the trade route known as the Silk Road. The natural dryness and salty soil preserved her and over two hundred other mummies, individuals who had lived in several closely located settlements along the trade route. The mummy has been called the Loulan Beauty because of her amazingly preserved stately facial features that have remained quite beautiful even in death.
Loulan herself lived to be about 40 to 45 and she probably died from lung disease caused by environmental pollution from open fires and the gritty sand in the air. She was buried in well-made woven clothing and some of the other mummies are actually wearing plaid patterned loomed cloth.
The Beauty of Loulan’s people are clearly of Caucasian descent and their grave goods suggest that they were probably merchants of textiles and perhaps leather goods. They were buried with many clothing items. The settlements along the Silk Road might very well have been meeting points where merchants from the west traded their goods for goods from the east. Having multicultural merchants would certainly have helped facilitate communication between the traders.