Hotan

Hotan : To the South of the Taklakaman Desert – a center of the silk trade. There is lively Sunday market which some say is as varied and interesting as the one in Kashgar. Among the interesting sites in and around Hotan are:

The Hetian District Museum – is on Tanayi Nan Lu next to the jade factory. Although it is a small museum it houses a large quantity of artifacts, including pottery animals and figures, clay figurines, coins, clothing, silk and carpet fragments, fresco samples, jade lamps, Tibetan bronzes, jewellery, chased silver and gold utensils, documents and carved wooden beams from the Niya ruins. The museum also exhibits well-preserved mummified corpses of two Buddhist monks, one in his 30s and the other a teenager. The feet of the fifth or sixth century AD mummies are bound to keep them resting in peace instead of wandering.

The Ancient City of Mallikurwatur – which is also known as the Mallikurwatur Ruins, is an ancient city lying 25 km southwest of Hotan, on the west bank of the Jade Dragon Kashgar River. There is some dispute about whether it is the ruins of an ancient city from the Yutian Kingdom or a monastery compound. Since 1977, various exactions have discovered a variety of ancient objects including potsherds and ancient coins.

The Ancient City of Niya - The ancient city of Niya is 150 km from Minfeng, an oasis in the Taklimakan Desert. The ruins are believed to be of the ancient Kingdom of Jingjue, one of the oasis states recorded in the Chinese Han Dynasty chronicles. However, the city vanished sometime between 500 and 1000 AD. The ruins were discovered in 1901 by the British explorer Aurel Stein. In 1993 and 1995, two Sino-Japanese expeditions unearthed other previously undiscovered ruins. At the heart of Taklamakan Desert, some existing wooden structures, including houses with courtyards, stables, graves, and clay Buddhist stupas, and even a bridge. In the residential quarter, the team also found jewellery, bronze mirrors, coins, arrowheads, household utensils and wooden tablets written in the long dead Kharoshthi script. Preserved beneath the sand, some naturally mummified corpses resting in hollowed-out tree trunks were excavated in the city ruins too (leading to comparisons with Pompei). Those corpses together with other findings indicate the city was once a place where Chinese met with Indians and Europeans – and was a place of trade and cultural exchanges. Although evidence indicates that it was the encroaching desert that destroyed the once prosperous city, enemy invasions might also have contributed to its demise.

The Ancient City of Yotkan – is situated about 10 km from Hotan and covers about 10 square km, the ruins are believed to be the capital city of the ancient Kingdom of Yutian, one of the oasis states in the Chinese Western Region along the Silk Road. In 1892, a French explorer came and collected many artifacts including pottery and jade articles. In 1896 and 1900 Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein were attracted to the city where they excavated a lot of artifacts including some gold coins, gold leaves and Christian crosses.