History

The Western Xia (Xi Xia) dynasty — a Tangut-speaking Buddhist kingdom that controlled the Hexi Corridor from 1038 to 1227 AD — founded Khara-Khoto around 1032 as an administrative and trading outpost at the northern end of their territory, where the Silk Road fanned out toward the Mongolian steppe. The city sat at the confluence of the Ejin and Terihin rivers (now dry), whose water sustained both the city’s inhabitants and the irrigated fields around it.

After Genghis Khan destroyed the Western Xia in 1227, Khara-Khoto passed to Mongol rule and was integrated into the Yuan Dynasty (the Mongolian empire’s Chinese successor). Marco Polo visited the area in the 1270s, though it is uncertain whether he visited the city itself; he refers to it as “Etzina.” Under the Mongols the city remained a functioning urban centre and an important node in the overland trade network, its Buddhist monasteries attracting monks from Tibet, Mongolia, and China.

In 1372, the newly established Ming Dynasty sent general Feng Sheng with a large army to eliminate remaining Mongol-aligned strongholds in the north. Khara-Khoto was besieged and captured. According to local legend, the Mongol commander dug a passage through the wall and attempted to escape with his family and gold, but was caught and executed. Feng Sheng’s forces demolished the irrigation infrastructure, and without water the city became uninhabitable. The desert moved in and covered the ruins in sand, and Khara-Khoto passed from history into legend — known only to local Mongolian nomads who called it “cursed” and avoided it.

In 1908, Russian explorer Pyotr Kozlov, travelling under a commission from Tsar Nicholas II to survey the Mongolian borderlands, reached the ruins of Khara-Khoto with his expedition. What Kozlov found was astonishing: because the extreme dryness of the Gobi Desert had perfectly preserved organic materials, the city’s contents were essentially intact after 535 years of abandonment. He excavated approximately 2,000 manuscripts in Tangut and Chinese, 300 Buddhist thangka paintings, printed books (among the oldest printed texts known), ceramic objects, and coins. A second expedition in 1909 recovered thousands more items, including a large stupa filled with 42 complete Buddhist statuettes and hundreds of individual devotional items.

All of these objects were transported to Saint Petersburg and are now in the State Hermitage Museum and the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts. The Tangut manuscripts from Khara-Khoto remain the largest corpus of Tangut-language texts in existence and were central to the eventual decipherment of the Tangut script in the 1970s by Soviet and later Chinese linguists. The removal of the collection is a persistent point of scholarly and diplomatic contention between China and Russia.