The beauty from Loulan is a handsome woman who was one of the first mummies discovered in the region. Her age is dated to around 1800 BC. Soon after her discovery in the late 1970s, she became a high-profile affair among the local Turkic-speaking Uighur population, who considered her their ancestress, which they believed gave them priority rights to the region over the Han Chinese, who arrived some 2,000 years later. Unfortunately, the Uighurs themselves did not arrive in the Tarym Basin until nearly a thousand years after the Han Chinese. So Beauty of Loulan embodies one of the many mysteries associated with the mummies, namely, if she was neither a Chinese-speaking Han Chinese nor a Turkic-speaking Uighur, what language did she speak? There is evidence pointing to Tocharian, the second oldest (after Hittite) Indo-European language.