With a population of 408,900 (2018 census),[4] Hotan is situated in the Tarim Basin some 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) southwest of the regional capital, Ürümqi.

The town, located southeast of Yarkant County and populated almost exclusively by Uyghurs, is a minor agricultural center.

Xuanzang, who was well-versed in Sanskrit, proposed that the traditional name was in fact Kustana (गौस्तन) and asserted it meant "breast of the earth".

The official Uyghur-to-Latin transliteration, and therefore English spelling, of the modern city's name is "Hotan" according to the Register of Chinese Geographic Places.

[12][13] A study in 2010 showed that an Eastern Eurasian lineage common in Siberia dominates the mitochondrial DNA of the mummies from the Xiaohe Cemetery.

The main historical sources are to be found in the Chinese histories (particularly detailed during the Han[15] and early Tang dynasties) when China was interested in control of the Western Regions, the accounts of several Chinese pilgrim monks,[16] a few Buddhist histories of Hotan that have survived in Classical Tibetan and a large number of documents in the Iranian Saka language and other languages discovered, for the most part, early this century at various sites in the Tarim Basin and from the hidden library at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang.

The inhabitants of the Kingdom of Khotan, like those of early Kashgar and Yarkant, spoke Saka, one of the Eastern Iranian languages.

Khotan's indigenous dynasty (all of whose royal names are Indian in origin) governed a fervently Buddhist city-state boasting some 400 temples in the late 9th/early 10th century—four times the number recorded by Xuanzang around 630.

[21][22][23] The rulers of Khotan were aware of the menace they faced since they arranged for the Mogao grottoes to paint a growing number of divine figures along with themselves.

[24] Yūsuf Qadr Khān was a brother or cousin of the Muslim ruler of Kashgar and Balasagun, Khotan lost its independence and between 1006 and 1165, became part of the Kara-Khanid Khanate.

It has cities and towns in plenty, of which the most splendid, and the capital of the province, bears the same name as that of the province…It is amply stocked with the means of life.

During the Republican era in China, warlords and local ethnic self-determination movements wrestled over control of Xinjiang.

[citation needed] Shortly after the Communists won the civil war in 1949, Hotan was incorporated into the People's Republic of China.

In June 2011, Hotan opened its first passenger-train service to Kashgar, which was established as a special economic zone following the riots.

In June 2011, authorities in Hotan Prefecture sentenced Uyghur Muslim Hebibullah Ibrahim to ten years imprisonment for selling "illegal religious materials".

In a report from the Uyghur American Association, in June 2012, notice was said to be given that police planned to undertake a search of every residence in Gujanbagh (Gujiangbage), Hotan.

[35][better source needed] The Sultanim Cemetery (37°07′02″N 79°56′04″E / 37.11722°N 79.93444°E / 37.11722; 79.93444) in central Hotan was a historical Uyghur graveyard that also included a religious shrine.

According to a 2019 interview by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the cemetery entombed four commanders of Sultan Satuq Bughra Khan, who conquered the city around 960 CE and spread Islam.

Due to space limitations after over a thousand years of burials, multiple bodies had to reuse the same grave, and additionals layers were dug underneath old ones.

[37][38][39][40] Hotan has a temperate zone, cold desert climate (Köppen BWk), with a mean annual total of only 36.5 millimetres (1.44 in) of precipitation falling on 17.3 days of the year.

Hotan is connected to the rest of China's rail network via the Kashgar–Hotan Railway, which opened to freight traffic in December 2010, and passenger service in June 2011.

There is also an express bus to Aksu via the 430 km (270 mi) 'Hotan-Aksu Cross-Desert Highway' which was opened in 2007, travels alongside the intermittent Hotan River, and which takes about 5 or 6 hours.

For several hundred years, until they were defeated by the Xiongnu in 176 BCE, the trade of Khotanese jade into China was controlled by the nomadic Yuezhi.

Ancient Chinese-Khotanese relations were so close that the oasis emerged as one of the earliest centres of silk manufacture outside China.

[59] According to one story, a Chinese princess given in marriage to a Khotan prince brought to the oasis the secret of silk-manufacture, "hiding silkworms in her hair as part of her dowry", probably in the first half of the 1st century CE.

The oldest piece of kilim which we have any knowledge was obtained by the archaeological explorer Aurel Stein; a fragment from an ancient settlement near Hotan, which was buried by sand drifts about the fourth century CE.