The peoples of the Tarim Basin in northern China are now known to be Caucasian and there were widespread attempts to keep western archeologists from testing samples such as deliberately replacing the mummies or decapitating them, even defacing ancient cave painting depictions of these people with large amounts of body hair and features such as red colored hair and blue eyes.

Uyghur activists identify with the Tarim mummies, but research into the genetics of ancient Tarim mummies and their links with modern Uyghurs remain controversial, both to Chinese government officials concerned with ethnic separatism, and to Uyghur activists concerned that research could affect their claims of being indigenous to the region.

Other undisturbed kurgans have been found to contain remarkably well-preserved remains, comparable to the earlier Tarim mummies of Xinjiang.

The Tarim Basin mummies ( 1800 BC ) have been found in the same general geographical area as the Tocharian texts and frescoes from the Tarim Basin ( 3rd to 9th centuries AD ), and are both connected to an Indo-European origin and point to Caucasoid types with light eyes and hair color.

Zhang Qian also describes the origins of the Yuezhi, explaining they came from the eastern part of the Tarim Basin, a momentous explanation which has encouraged historians to connect them to the Caucasoid mummies, as well as to the Indo-European-speaking Tocharians that have been identified from precisely the same area:

Archaeologists have discovered the buried remains of settlements, as well as several of the Tarim mummies, along its ancient shoreline.

Some of the earliest Tarim mummies were discovered in burial sites at Qäwrighul ( Gumugou ) which is located to the west of Lop Nur on the Könchi ( Kongque ) river.

* Tarim mummies

** The Tarim Mummies, a series of mummies which have been excavated at Niya, an oasis in the Tarim Basin.

Several of the Tarim mummies were found in the region.

Recent DNA testing on the mummies found in the Tarim basin showed that they were an admixture of Western Europeans and East Asian.

The first habitants of the region were Indo-Europeans from the west, and well-preserved mummies of European origin have been found in the Tarim area.

* Tarim mummies

* Tarim mummies

A 3, 800-year-old female mummy ( circa 1600 BCE ), the first of a series of mummies now known as the Tarim mummies, was discovered in Loulan in 1980, indicating very early settlement of the region.

The book makes a number of non-orthodox theories about history, including that the Tarim mummies indicate that the Uyghurs were " older than Chinese civilization itself ", and that the Uyghurs invented the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing.

The Tarim mummies are a series of mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China, which date from 1900 BCE to 200 CE.

These mummified remains may have been of people who spoke Indo-European languages, that remained in use in the Tarim Basin, in the modern day Xinjiang region, until replaced by Turkic influences from the northern Xiongnu Empire, and by Chinese influences from the eastern Han Dynasty, who spoke a Sino-Tibetan language.

were blue ( or green )- eyed, fair-skinned and light-haired people which might have played a role in the early development of the Tarim Basin civilization.

Samples of Greek tapestry have been found preserved in the desert of Tarim Basin dating from the 3rd century BC.

Several coins of Kanishka have been found in the Tarim Basin.

They were originally settled in the arid grasslands of the eastern Tarim Basin area, in what is today Xinjiang and western Gansu, in China, before they migrated to Transoxiana, Bactria and then northern South Asia, where they may have had a part in forming the Kushan Empire.

The main historical sources are to be found in the Chinese histories ( particularly detailed during the Han and early Tang dynasties ), the accounts of several Chinese pilgrim monks, a few Buddhist histories of Hotan that have survived in Tibetan, and a large number of documents in Khotanese and other languages discovered, for the most part, early this century at various sites in the Tarim Basin and from the hidden library at the “ Caves of the Thousand Buddhas ” near Dunhuang.

It is speculated that the Tarim Basin may be one of the last places in Asia to have become inhabited: It is surrounded by mountains and irrigation technologies might have been necessary.

Poplars forests and tamarix shrubs used to be extensively distributed along the lower Tarim River Valley forming the so-called ' Green Corridor ', but with the drying up of the lower Tarim River since 1972 due to the building of dams, they have greatly deteriorated and some have disappeared.

However, no known environmental or social impact assessments have been conducted, as the environmental record of Tarim Basins is very poor.

Central Asian Buddhist monks from the Tarim Basin and East Asian Buddhist monks appear to have maintained strong exchanges until around the 10th century, as shown by frescoes from the Tarim Basin.

After the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate in AD 840, Uyghur resettled from Mongolia to the Tarim Basin, assimilating the Indo-European population, which had previously been driven out of the region by the Xiongnu.

Prior to the battle, there were other indirect encounters between some of the combatants, and the military might of China had been projected beyond the harsh continental climate and the dry, desolate, and difficult terrain of the Tarim Basin, much of which consists of the Taklamakan Desert, as early as the Han Dynasty, when Emperor Wu of Han sent military expeditions to seize horses which got as far as the Ferghana.

The Kushans were nomadic people who started migrating from the Tarim Basin in Central Asia from around 170 BCE and ended up founding an empire in northwestern India from the 2nd century BCE, after having been rather Hellenized through their contacts with the Greco-Bactrians, and later the Indo-Greeks ( they adopted the Greek script for writing ).

Vima Takto's empire covered northwestern India and Bactria towards China, where Kushan presence has been asserted in the Tarim Basin.

The rocks are severely weathered on the surface, a thick layer of the coarser products of denudation covers the flat parts and climbs a good way up the flanks of the mountain ranges, but all the finer material, sand and clay has been blown away partly southeast into the Ordos, partly into the Chinese provinces of Shen-si and Shan-si, where it is deposited as loess, and partly west, where it chokes all the southern parts of the basin of the Tarim.

A bronze coin of Kanishka found in Khotan, Tarim Basin

Hedin navigated the Yarkand, Tarim and Kaidu rivers and found the dry riverbed of the Kum-darja as well as the dried out lake bed of the Lop Nur.

Highly sinicized forms of this syncretism can also be found on the eastern portions of the Tarim Basin, such as in Dunhuang.

Most of these mummies were found on the eastern end of the Tarim Basin ( around the area of Lopnur, Subeshi near Turpan, Kroran, Kumul ), or from ( Khotan, Niya, and Cherchen or Qiemo ), along the southern edge of the Tarim Basin.

The earliest Tarim mummies, found at Qäwrighul and dated to 1800 BCE, are of a Europoid physical type whose closest affiliation is to the Bronze Age populations of southern Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and the Lower Volga.

The cemetery at Yanbulaq contained 29 mummies which date from 1100 – 500 BCE, 21 of which are Mongoloid — the earliest Mongoloid mummies found in the Tarim Basin — and 8 of which are of the same Europoid physical type found at Qäwrighul.

:" From the evidence available, we have found that during the first 1, 000 years after the Loulan Beauty, the only settlers in the Tarim Basin were Caucasoid.

The Sampul tapestry is a woolen wall-hanging that was found in Sampul, in the Tarim Basin inside a 3rd-2nd century BCE mass grave.

Military victories in the Tarim Basin kept the Silk Road open, connecting Chang ' an to Central Asia and areas far to the west.

Sitting on many trade and migration routes, Afghanistan may be called the ' Central Asian roundabout ' since routes converge from the Middle East, from the Indus Valley through the passes over the Hindu Kush, from the Far East via the Tarim Basin, and from the adjacent Eurasian Steppe.

After the Uyghur empire disintegrated a branch of the Uyghurs migrated to oasis settlements in the Tarim Basin and Gansu, such as Karakhoja ( Gaochang ) and Kumul ( Hami ), and set up a confederation of decentralized Buddhist states called Kara-Khoja.

Others, mainly closely related to the Uyghurs ( the Karluks ), occupying the western Tarim Basin, Ferghana Valley, Jungaria and parts of modern Kazakhstan bordering the Muslim Turco-Tajik Khwarazm Sultanate, converted to Islam no later than the 10th century and built a federation with Muslim institutions called Kara-Khanlik, whose princely dynasties are called Karakhanids by most historians.

The Kushan were Indo-European-speaking Tocharians from the Tarim Basin.

* Downloadable article: " Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age " Li et al.

Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia.

Manuscript from Gaochang | Khocho, Tarim Basin.

Photograph of Aurel Stein, with his dog and research team, in the Tarim Basin

Stein discovered manuscripts in the previously lost Tocharian languages of the Tarim Basin at Marin and other oasis towns, and recorded numerous archaeological sites especially in Iran and Balochistan.

Xinjiang, also known as Chinese Turkestan, was subdivided into the regions north and south of the Tian Shan mountains, also known today as Dzungaria and Tarim Basin respectively, but the post of Ili General was established in 1762 to exercise unified military and administrative jurisdiction over both regions.

Tocharian or Tokharian ( or ) is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family, formerly spoken in oases on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin ( now part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China ).

Prakrit documents from 3rd century Kroran on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin contain loanwords and names that appear to come from another variety of Tocharian, dubbed Tocharian C.

Nevertheless " Tocharian " remains the standard term for the language of the Tarim Basin manuscripts.

An estimated 80 % of Xinjiang's Uyghurs live in the southwestern portion of the region, the Tarim Basin.

Finally it was expanded to an ethnicity, whose ancestry originates with the fall of the Uyghur Khaganate in the year 842 AD, which caused Uyghur migration from Mongolia into the Tarim Basin.

Victor Mair has stated that the Uyghur peoples arrived at the Tarim Basin after the Orkon Uighur Kingdom ( present-day Mongolia ) fell around 842 AD.

Historians generally agree that the adoption of the term " Uyghur " is based on a decision from a 1921 conference in Tashkent, which was attended by Turkic Muslims from the Tarim Basin ( Xinjiang ).

In current usage, Uyghur refers to settled Turkic urban dwellers and farmers of the Tarim Basin and Ili who follow traditional Central Asian sedentary practices, as distinguished from nomadic Turkic populations in Central Asia.

Chagatai's ulus, or hereditary territory, consisted of the part of the Mongol Empire which extended from the Ili River ( today in eastern Kazakhstan ) and Kashgaria ( in the western Tarim Basin ) to Transoxiana ( modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan ).

* The Chinese General Ban Chao completes his conquest of the Tarim Basin by taking Yanqi.

* In China, Ban Yong, son of Ban Chao, reestablishes the Chinese control over the Tarim Basin.

* The Chinese government establishes Aide of the Western Regions over the Tarim Basin.