In 1800 BCE middle-aged dead body of a woman who lived in the Xinjiang region of China was well preserved and this mummy became famous by the name of the Beauty of Loulan or Loulan Beauty. Owing to great conservation style and facial features that have remained quite beautiful even in death the mummy is one of the most famous Tarim mummies and is called the Loulan Beauty. 4000 years ago, during the Bronze Age, Loulan died on the trade route known as the Silk Road. She was found on April 1, 1980, near the Silk Road in China, by Chinese archaeologists Mu Sun-ing and members of the Archaeological Institute of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences. The woman is estimated to have been between 40 and 48 years old at the time of her death. The body is 152–155 cm in stature and her blood type was O. It is to be noted that the Tarim Basin mummies have remained a mystery ever since European explorers discovered them in northwestern China in the early 20th century. The natural dryness and salty soil preserved the Loulan beauty and over two hundred other mummies, individuals who had lived in several closely located settlements along the trade route. It preserved even the finer details of Loulan beauty’s face, such as her eyelashes. The mummy is currently displayed in the "Mummy Hall" of Xinjiang Museum. Loulan is the fabled city near the vanished Lop Lake that lay in the northeastern corner of the Tarim Basin. The Beauty of Loulan was among the first woman mummies to be discovered in the region. Shortly after she was found in the late 1970s, she became a controversial issue among the local Turkic-speaking Uyghur people who considered her their ancestor, which they believed gave them a prior claim to the region over the Han Chinese, who arrived about 2,000 years later. Unfortunately, the Uyghurs themselves did not arrive in the Tarim Basin until nearly a millennium after the Han Chinese. Thus, the Beauty of Loulan embodies one of the many mysteries about the mummies, namely, if she were neither a Sinitic-speaking Chinese nor a Turkic-speaking Uyghur, what language did she speak? Evidence exists indicating she may well have spoken Tocharian, the second oldest (after Hittite) Indo-European language. Victor Mair, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, helped in getting access to these mummies. He and Paolo Francalacci, a geneticist, were finally able to obtain some genetic samples in 1993. Their findings revealed that the mummies are indeed European but they probably migrated from the Siberian region and are unrelated to the Uyghur. The Chinese government did allow further testing in 2007 and 2009 and the findings supported the Siberian connection as well as suggesting the mixing of people from Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Europe, and other unknown sources. Unfortunately, as per controversy, it has been distracted somewhat from the fact that there were Europeans in China at least a thousand years before conventional history has Caucasians in this area of the world. Tall, blue eyes with wool felt hats and leather booties, and fair hair— The Loulan Beauty is clearly Caucasian, with her high cheekbones, high bridged nose, and blonde hair. 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 including one man who was buried with ten hats, all of different styles. 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. 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. Many of the mummies are tattooed. The tattoos appear to have been done where the design is achieved by the puncture technique, not the sewing technique. The puncture method results in darker and larger fields of colour and is much more like modern tattooing.