Charklik was the name for an ancient settlement of the kingdom of Kroraina (Chinese: Loulan; later Shanshan) from at least as far back as the 1st century BCE.

[1] The explorer and archaeologist Aurel Stein visited the small oasis of Charklik in 1906, where he found a little village that was the official headquarters of a very large district, almost entirely desert, and which included the salt lake known as Lop Nor.

The Buddhist monk Xuanzang passed through a town called Na-Fu-Bo (纳缚波) on his way home to China in 645 CE, and Marco Polo in the 13th century passed through a place he called the town of Lop,[2] Both of these were suggested by Aurel Stein to be Charklik.

[3] Stein wrote that there was "conclusive evidence" that Charklik was already the chief centre of the region when Xuanzang passed through it.

[4][5] At various times in history Charklik was the last stop on the difficult Southern Silk Road from Khotan before it crossed the much-feared salt pans of Lop Nor to Dunhuang.