The discovery of Caucasoid mummies in China shows that East and West have been meeting since the Bronze Age. Do they validate some of our most ancient legends? Christopher Columbus is said to have been the first to break down the barrier that was the Atlantic Ocean, that massive body of water separating two continents. But such a physical obstruction never existed between Europe and the East – one could always travel over land. The discovery of Caucasoid mummies in China provides not only indisputable evidence ‘Europeans’ travelled to the far East thousands of years before anyone imagined, it has also created controversy.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the likes of Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein travelled to the East in search of ancient civilisations, hoping to reach the then forbidden city of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and its ruler, the Dalai Lama. On their travels to this almost mythical region, they stumbled upon many ancient ruins and on occasion spoke about the discoveries of desiccated bodies.

In 1907, the Russian explorer Pyotr Kuzmich Koslov (1863-1935) actually reached Lhasa and met the Dalai Lama. Afterwards, he organised further expeditions and excavated Khara Khoto, a Tangut city founded in 1032 that had been ruined by the Ming Chinese in 1372. Koslov unearthed a tomb fifty feet below the ruins and found the body of a woman, apparently a queen, accompanied by various sceptres, wrought in gold and other metals. Though Koslov took numerous photographs that were published inAmerican Weekly, he was not allowed to disturb or remove anything from the tomb, which was sealed again. His last expedition to Mongolia and Tibet occurred from 1923 to 1926 and resulted in the discovery of Xiongnu royal burials at Noin-Ula.

When news of such discoveries were reported back in the West, it ignited a wide interest in the mysteries of the East, which even today remain largely beyond the reach of most tourists. It were in these remote regions that James Churchward (1851-1936) claimed he had found evidence of a lost civilisation: Mu. For Churchward, Mu was a lost civilisation and continent in the East, which he estimated was 50,000 years old and once the home of 64 million inhabitants. Though Mu once stretched from Micronesia in the West to Easter Island and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, knowledge – if not descendants – of Mankind’s original homeland could possibly be found in India and surrounding regions. Churchward believed that the primary colony of Mu was the Great Uyghur Empire, Khara Khoto being its ancient capital, and the civilisation was at its height around 15,000 BCE.

Check any encyclopaedia and you will find Churchward ‘borrowed’ that name from the historical Uyghur, who today live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.

Churchward’s Mu was not too different from Madame Blavatsky’s Lemuria, and it was the American Theosophist Gottfried de Purucker (1874-1942) who published his thoughts on Blavatsky’s doctrine in 1937. He argued that this region, this “enormous tract of country, most of it desert waste,” was once fertile and lush with cities, and that it was here one would “find the seat from which we came as a racial stock,” which was the “Fifth Root Race.” Blavatsky described the fifth root race as such:

The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock – the Fifth Root-Race – and spring from one single progenitor, […] who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago – at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis.

Later, the French author Robert Charroux (1909-1978) wrote that the Gobi Desert had Magi, or sages of the East, surpassing in wisdom even those resident in Tibet. Stories go that these cities once had ocean ports, and Edgar Cayce even argued that a “City of Gold” will be discovered in the Gobi Desert, including a temple with elevators and electric cars. Others have seen this region as the homeland of those ancient UFOs, the vimanas.