As early as the 1920s and 1930s, the late Guiseppe Tucci -- a noted Italian Tibetologist -- turned his eyes to ancient tombs in western Tibet.

He found tombs covered with stone slabs in Leh city in Ladakh. He recalled "tombs, built with unpolished stones... each measuring 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) long, 1.4 meters (4.6 feet) wide and 1.8 meters deep. Handmade pottery... was sometimes adorned with deep-red patterns."

Tucci, professor of Oriental religions and philosophies at the University of Rome, unearthed many skulls from these tombs.

The skulls were rectangular in shape, in sharp contrast to the short skulls of modern people.

Other findings included bronze articles, such as thumb-sized oval beads and pendulums with a triangular hole in the top.

The Italian expert covered Ngari Plateau, where he found tombs surrounded by piles of stones.

All these remained to be mysterious for the following almost half a century as no one made any efforts to follow Tucci's footsteps.

In 1957, Chinese archaeologists went to Ngari Plateau to survey the ruins of the ancient Guge kingdom. The area was re-examined in 1979, 1981 and 1985.

But only in 1998 did archaeologists begin to reap some fruit from their efforts to explore the mysteries of the Guge kingdom.

With the Cultural Relics Preservation Team in Ngari, they discovered ancient tombs in a place known as Karpur, where pottery dating back to a period earlier than the Guge kingdom were found.

When I saw them at an exhibition in 1999, I was astonished to find they were just like what Tucci had described.

In early August 1999, I set foot in Ngari for the sixth time together with other archaeologists. A torrential rainstorm had washed the area in the days before, and the area was very wet.

One day, when we were on our way back to our camping ground in the afternoon, we came across an old friend whose nickname was Engyila -- "doctor" in Tibetan -- and his wife Soiyang in Piyang village.

They had been our hosts during our previous trial digs in the village. We had not seen each other for several years. Upon his invitation, we went to their home for a tea break.

While we were talking and sipping buttered tea, Soiyang was weaving a wool carpet. Now and then, she would stop to refill our bowls with buttered tea. At one point, Soiyang reached her hand under the table and brought out a pottery jar to twine sheep's wool yarn. But the pottery jar did not attract our attention while we were drinking the buttered tea.

When she filled our empty bowls once again, after we had already had several drinks, she again took out the pottery jar.

This time, we watched how she twined the wool around the pottery. We were surprised at its shape and asked for a closer look.

Engyila and Soiyang appreciated that this must be something important and gave us the pottery jar. It looked just like those we saw at the exhibition of cultural relics unearthed in Karpur.

Brown in color, it had been painted with a red pattern. Its mouth was upturned, and patterns were carved onto its handle.

We asked them where they found it, and Soiyang told us that the torrential rain had revealed a pit about one meter (3 feet) below ground level.

"We found some pottery there," Soiyang said. "As the jar is long in shape, we use it to serve as a spindle. The others were not useful for us, and our children have smashed them all."

At our request, Engyila gathered together the broken pottery segments, and brought us to the pit.

We found human bones there and concluded that the pit was part of an ancient tomb.

During the rainy summer of 1999, we found 26 tombs and one pit for sacrificial horses. Our digging covered an area of 200 square meters (239 square yards) in the Zada basin.

The large tombs were square, rectangular or ladder-shaped, while the small and medium-sized ones were irregular round stone mounds. In some of the tombs, we found sheep heads, and one tomb had up to 18 sheep heads inlaid in each of the four walls.

In the tombs, we found pottery, bone artifacts, stone and iron tools, and wooden and bamboo implements. Most of the pottery was brown or vermilion in color, with round bottoms. A small number of pieces had a flat bottom and a few had three handles.

The patterns had all been made with ropes or cutting tools. Other findings included a bronze sword like those unearthed in Yunnan.

The pit with sacrificial horses was 1.6 meters (5.2 feet) long, 0.6 meters (1.9 feet) wide and 0.2 meters (0.7 feet) below the surface.

The largeness of a headless skeleton inside led us to conclude that the bones belonged to a horse.

According to ancient Tibetan documents, the people of the ancient Zhangzhong civilization slaughtered animals and made the animals’ burial objects. By tradition, they spread layers of cinnabar under the slaughtered animals.

We entrusted specialists at Peking University and the Archaeological Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to carry out carbon-14 dating tests on the objects we had found. The specialists came to the conclusion that the objects dated back between 2,725 and 2,170 years, corresponding to the Qin (221-206 BC) and Han (206 BC-AD 220) dynasties in the Central Plains (Central China).

According to historical records, before the rise of the Tubo kingdom, the Zhangzhong kingdom was located in western Tibet. Zhangzhong was later subdued and became part of the Tubo kingdom.

When the Tubo kingdom was itself toppled, the Guge kingdom was founded on the site of the Zhangzhong kingdom.

The discovery of these ancient tombs is obviously a blessing that offers clues for archaeologists to unveil the ancient but still mysterious Zhangzhong civilization.

(The article first appears in China's Tibet magazine Vol.13 No.2, 2002)

(China Daily April 4, 2002)