Hi everyone and welcome back, Lausl Montgomery here with another China History Podcast episode for you.

Part 2 in our 5,000 year overview of the history of Xinjiang.

I mentioned before and I'll say it again. The term Xinjiang didn't get affixed to that part of China until 1884 following a major and historic revolt that happened out there. We'll get to that in good time. So it's strictly for the

sake of inconvenience that I'll refer to that land as Xinjiang throughout this

series. Well last time we went up as high as Felix Baumgartner again

looking down on the geography of Xinjiang, surrounded in every direction

with dense mountain chains, the Tianshan and all-time mountains to the north,

the Kunlun Mountains to the south, and the Palmeers to the west.

And the star of this whole production was the Tarim Basin, totally

surrounded by these mountains, real mountains like you see in a National Geographic

special, not these Hollywood hills here, and deserts.

They could stand toe to toe with anything you could find in the Sahara or Rubachaili.

It was a harsh environment, but over the past 5,000 years, there were times

when it was a lot less harsh than it was at other times. And besides the Tarim Basin,

there were also two other notable basins where a lot of history played out over the millennia.

The Tungarian basin in the north and the Turpon Basin located in between the two.

We looked at the Tarim mummies and

how that opened up a whole new chapter in the prehistory of that region. We noted

a number of Western explorers, adventurers, and scholars who got the ball rolling with the earliest excavation

and study of these mummies and all the garments and artifacts they were buried with.

And there were also a number of theories about who these cockazoid original inhabitants were,

where they came from, and when they got there,

...