14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese people are maybe the symbol for the Mongoloid race. The first question that emerges in our mind when we see an Asian face is: are you Chinese?
Even if many are Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and so on.
But what people do not know is that during the Antiquity, while Egyptians were building their impressive pyramids and Greeks were fighting for Troy, Western China was in fact inhabited by blond-haired blue-eyed white people.
Now, a group of Chinese archaeologists is attempting to identify a 2,800-year-old mummy of an Caucasian man found in an ancient tomb from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (Northwest China), another from a long series.
The well-preserved mummy is likely the one of a shaman and has been under examination since it has been found in 2003.
The scientists were puzzled by the presence of a sack of marijuana leaves that archaeologists found buried with the leather-coat bound mummy.
"From his outfit and the marijuana leaves, which have been confirmed by international specialists to be ingredients for narcotic, we assume the man had been a shaman and had been between 40 and 50 years old when he died," noted historian Li Xiao explained.
The 2003 exploration on the area brought to light 600 mummies from 2,000 area tombs.
These mummies of the white people that once inhabited Western China were not embalmed, like the Egyptian ones, but they were unwittingly preserved from decay by local climate: extreme summer heat and aridity, bitter winter cold, and salty soil.
When researchers first discovered the mummies, they were astonished by their certain European appearance, with blond or red hair, prominent noses, mustaches and beards, tartan-weave garments, and jaunty feathered caps.
The mummy people, called the Tocharians, left even a written language that is clearly Indo-European.
Also, in old Chinese chronicles, contacts with red-haired people from the west are depicted.