In the southern part of the Gobi Desert lies the dead city of Hara-Khoto, hidden by the sands. The legends about him have always excited the imagination of Russian researchers, scientists and travelers. The pupil of Nikolai Przhevalsky, Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov, who dreamed of solving the secrets of this lost city, was also interested in them.
Petr Kuzmich Kozlov
In November 1907, at the head of the Mongol-Sichuan expedition, he left for Mongolia. The local population carefully concealed the location of the ancient ruins from outsiders. However, Kozlov managed to enlist the support of the local prince of the Torgout-Beile tribe and with the help of a guide named Bata, who had visited the dead city more than once, on March 19, 1908, the expedition approached the Khara-Khoto, located in the bend of the Etszin-Gol River.
The Dead City greeted the travelers with a high fortress wall, forming a square along the perimeter. The side is over a kilometer long. The six-meter-thick walls were fortified with towers and suburgans (memorial structures, relics, tombs). All walls, except for the western one, were covered with sand to the very top.
There were two gates leading to the city. On the sides protruded bastions that covered the gates from attack. Two parallel streets lined with ruins of houses crossed the entire city. Kozlov called one of the streets Glavnaya, the second - Torgovaya.
It was possible to discern the traces of roads that led from both sides to the city. Numerous suburgans and ruins of buildings could be seen in small groups along them. A significant part of the city did not fit into the fortress walls and was spread over the surrounding plain.
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A secret prayer room in the north wall of the fortress
From the gates arranged in the western and eastern walls, two large streets ran to the center, along which were rows of small adobe houses, covered with straw, and on top - with a solid crust of clay. Everywhere there were suburgans - Buddhist stupas (memorial structures, storage of relics, tombs).
The western corner of the Khara-Khoto fortress / Photo: Petr Kozlov
Archaeologists began excavations and in the first days unique items were discovered: books, household utensils, women's jewelry, metal and paper money. All finds were sent to St. Petersburg to the Geographical Society to determine the age and historical era of the dead city. Soon the answer came. It turned out that Hara-Khoto was once the capital of the state of Xi Xia, most of whose population professed Buddhism.
Ruins of Khara-Khoto from the east side
The researchers paid special attention to the suburgan, which stood aside from the fortress, on the bank of a dried-up river and later received the name "Famous". He presented the expedition with almost three hundred paintings on canvas, silk and paper, skillfully woven tapestries, bronze and gilded figurines of deities with unusually expressive faces, coins, silver and gold jewelry, various utensils, as well as a whole library: about 2,000 books, many scrolls and manuscripts.
A wonderful image was also discovered on the canvas (tangka) "Vajavarahi" - the Diamond Boer. The colors have remained so bright and fresh, as if the image had been painted only yesterday, and yet it had lain underground for more than one century. All finds are well preserved in a dry desert climate.
Ritual crowns, which were often made from worn out household or even sacred books using the papier-mâché technique, and painted with glue paints, became a legendary find. Sometimes they were decorated with images of lotuses or ornaments, sometimes with figures of deities. Some of the crowns lost their strength over time and stratified, but one of them survived and the restorers managed to restore it. This is the Mukut Crown - it consists of five teeth, decorated with images of female Dakini deities and fixed on a common cloth bandage.
On the pedestal of the "Famous", right in the center, was a wooden pole, and around it were clay statues, as if gathered for a council. A human skeleton was found near the wall. As it turned out later, she was an elderly woman, probably a Buddhist nun. Before them lay huge handwritten sheets of the letter "si xia", hundreds of them superimposed on one another. The unusual writing of the Tanguts could remain one of the secrets, but the Tangut-Chinese dictionary found here also made it possible to read these manuscripts.
The "famous" suburgan at the end of the excavation. Clay statues with gilded faces
Among the manuscripts found in Hara-Khoto was a fortune-telling book designed to identify happy and unlucky days, with recipes for medicines for equine diseases. One fragment of 14 lines turned out to be an excerpt from the teachings of Genghis Khan. And during the excavation of houses inside the city, bundles of banknotes of the Yuan dynasty were found, on which the inscription was preserved: "The heads will be cut off for forgers."
Ruins of a mosque at the southwestern corner of the fortress
In 1923-1926 Kozlov again worked for two months in Khara-Khoto. While freeing parts of the buildings from the sand, his employees discovered beautiful frescoes that adorned all the walls. The colors were dominated by greenish-blue tones, and the drawing mostly depicted fantastic birds, such as a two-headed parrot. In one of the niches of the northern wall, the researchers were lucky to find a whole series of clay heads with different facial expressions. These, apparently, in most cases were fragments of figurines of Buddha's disciples.
Nomad Tanguts / Photo: Peter Kozlov
So the desire of the Russian traveler was fulfilled. He tore the secret of the dead city from the Gobi Desert and presented priceless treasures to world science.
Used materials by V. Luknitsky from the site e-reading.club