Discovery of the Dead City of Khara-khoto: A story of exploration and betrayal

This is a story of exploration, colonial exploitation and betrayal. The background story is the discovery of the dead city of Khara-khoto, deep in the inhospitable sands of the Gobi Desert. The ruins of the city were allegedly discovered by the Russian officer-explorer Pyotr Kozlov in 1908, but in reality they had been found a year earlier by his Buryat protégé Tsogto Badmazhapov. It turns out that Badmazhapov had already been at the ruins in 1907, took photographs and wrote a brief report, which he sent to the Russian Geographical Society and Kozlov, asking them to publish it in their bulletin. Not only did they not publish the report, they suppressed the entire thing and instead made Kozlov "discover" the site the following year. This was a major discovery which propelled Kozlov to celebrity status, he was lauded in the press, received prizes and was elected honorary member of the Geographical Society. Badmazhapov was angry but was unable to resolve the issue. In the Russia, he was an "inorodets", that is, an ethnic minority, and there were a whole lot of ways in which he could be pressured. In the end, he fell victim to Stalin's pogrom in 1937. The ruins of Khara-khoto, on the other hand, yielded a wealth of books and manuscripts and art in Tangut, Chinese and Tibetan. The discovery led to the decipherment of Tangut, a dead language originally spoken in the Tangut kingdom during the 11th to 13th centuries.

For a more detailed description of this whole story, please see Chapter 1: "Ruins of a forgotten city" from my book:

http://shahon.org/wp-content/uploads/...

If you read Russian, you could also look at these very good webpages:

https://www.vokrugsveta.ru/vs/article...

https://scfh.ru/news/-mertvyy-gorod-k...


--Video's Table of Contents--
00:00 Rumors of the dead city
01:32 Kozlov's earlier career
03:12 Kozlov's "discovery" of the dead city
06:52 Return to Khara-khoto
09:36 Badmazhapov, the true discoverer
11:44 Betrayal and injustice
14:06 Badmazhapov's rehabilitation