Khara-Khoto

The people are Idolaters, and possess plenty of camels and cattle, and the country produces a number of good falcons, both Sakers and Lanners.

At this city you must needs lay in victuals for forty days, because when you quit Etzina, you enter on a desert which extends forty days' journey to the north, and on which you meet with no habitation nor baiting-place.According to a legend of the local Torghut population, in 1372 a Mongol military general named Khara Bator[3] was surrounded with his troops by the armies of the Ming dynasty.

After his suicide, Khara Bator's soldiers waited within the fortress until Ming troops finally attacked and killed the remaining inhabitants.

Another version of the legend holds that Khara Bator made a breach in the northwestern corner of the city wall and escaped through it.

The defeat of the Mongols at Khara-Khoto is described in the Ming dynasty annals: "In the fifth year of Hungu (1372), General Feng Sheng and his army reached Edzina.

Russian explorers Grigory Potanin and Vladimir Obruchev heard rumours that somewhere downstream the Ejin River an ancient city was waiting.

This knowledge gave impetus to the Asian Museum, St. Petersburg, to launch a new Mongol-Sichuan expedition under the command of Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov.

On May 1, 1908, during his 1907–1909 expedition to Central Asia, Kozlov arrived at Khara-Khoto and, with a dinner and gift of a gramophone to a local Torghut lord Dashi Beile, obtained permission to dig at the site.

He made maps of Khara-Khoto and the Ejin River area, surveyed watchtowers and fortresses, finding a large number of xylographs.

[1][5][15] In addition to books, these excavations unearthed building materials, daily items, production instruments and religious art.

The books and manuscripts sent back to St. Petersburg by Kozlov were studied by Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, who identified several Tangut dictionaries, including a Chinese-Tangut glossary titled Pearl in the Palm (Chinese: 番汉合时掌中珠), compiled in 1190.

[16] In addition to written artifacts, the Khara-Khoto collection in the Hermitage Museum includes paintings on silk, mainly of Buddhist subjects in Chinese and Tibetan styles.

[22] The Church flourished under the Mongol rule, and a metropolitan province bearing the name of Tangut was created in the end of the 13th century.