No one in our exploration team was in the mood to get out and stretch our legs, even though we had been sitting in the jeeps for 15 hours.

For the past three hours, our motorcade had stopped and changed direction seven times in Lop Nur, the no man's land in the heart of the gobi desert in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Having come together in an expedition to learn about the local ecology and the protection of the rich historical sites, we were trying to travel from east to west through Lop Nur.

It had seemed we were running to and fro like a shuttle bus, as we were always seeing what looked like the same stretch of gobi desert covered with tiny stones, with 5-metre-tall stone hillocks about 20 meters away without a single blade of grass.

However, even the hillocks had now disappeared from sight. Outside the jeeps was a suffocating darkness. The only beams of light were from the dramatically beautiful starry sky, through which the Milky Way ran like an arch.

"Maybe we are really lost this time, like Peng Jiamu," whispered one of the team members.

Peng, an internationally influential chemist and geologist and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hit the headlines in 1980 after disappearing at the southeastern route into the Lop Nur part of the gobi desert in Xinjiang's Bayingolin Mongolin Autonomous Prefecture.

He left the camp one morning when his team was running out of water and petrol, with a note saying: "I have gone to find water."

There was speculation that Peng set out for the location of a well marked on a map drawn in the 1940s.

Inch by inch, more than 100 rescuers searched the whole area where Peng could have walked, centered on the camp, but the scientist was not found either alive or dead.

Now, more than 20 years later, we had got lost in the area where Peng disappeared.

The motorcade changed direction for the eighth time. Half an hour later, some dim light appeared on the horizon. We headed towards the light for another hour but did not seem to approach it even a little. We finally reached the place more than two hours later. It turned out a small factory producing sylvite, the key land mark for explorers in Lop Nur.

The difficulty in telling one direction from another is the main reason why Lop Nur has swallowed many explorers over more than a century, said Wu Shiguang, a member of our team and a professional explorer.

Lop Nur, covering 3,000 square kilometers, has been called the Bermuda of China. It has been a forbidden land since the area's waters dried up more than 100 years ago.

Wu was the leader of the rescue team that found the body of Yu Chunshun, a leading Chinese explorer, in Lop Nur in 1996. Yu died naked in the gobi at a spot that was within 20 minutes' walk of a water source that had already been prepared.

Yu, who had completed 72 explorations around China, turned west at a point where he should have gone south, said Wu.

Despite the dangers, Lop Nur still attracted explorers and scholars like a magnet.

Recorded in "Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas)," a Chinese geological document written before the third century BC, what is now the gobi was then the largest lake in China and around it were populated oases.

For a millennium after the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), the Lop Nur area was the centre of China's western regions and the hub of communications on the Silk Road, which linked the East with the West.

Historical documents show that many kingdoms existed in the area in that millennium. Explorers - including Sven Hedin, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, Huang Wenbi and Wang Binghua - found remains or made trial excavations of remains of the Loulan (Kroraina) Kingdom, the city of Milan, the Xiaohe site and the city of Haitou.

"Contemporary explorers have yet to set foot in most areas of Lop Nur," said Wu.

Our exploration was organized by the Chinese Society of Cultural Heritage, the Chinese Great Wall Society and the Bayingolin prefectural government. The team members included explorers and experts on the preservation of cultural heritage.

We had been well equipped with Global Positioning System appliances, cellphones, an oil truck and 16 Toyota 4500 or 4700 jeeps. We set off late last month from Dunhuang in Northwest China's Gansu Province.

We arrived at the remains of the Loulan Kingdom on the evening of the second day, after driving like jumping kangaroos for 35 hours in the gobi desert.

Loulan Kingdom

A kingdom built on a small oasis in Lop Nur two millenniums ago, Loulan surprised the world in the 1900s when the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin (1865-1952) and the Hungarian archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) dug out the ruins and took from its ruins exquisite bas-reliefs, colorful silks, lacquer ware, bronze mirrors and ancient documents and then exhibited the relics in London and Berlin.

The art works, which had maintained their brilliant colors in the dry weather, were in the Grandhara, traditional Chinese and classical Greek styles.

Historical documents show that the Loulan Kingdom rose to prominence in the second century BC when the Western Han Dynasty fought with the Huns on a great prairie, as this was the only way for the two armies to meet.

For nearly 400 years it had remained an economic and military hub on the Silk Road and been constantly recorded in historical documents until the Jin Dynasty (AD 265-420) when it suddenly stopped being mentioned.

Why did the prosperous land fall into oblivion so abruptly? Was it abandoned on purpose or destroyed by its enemies or natural forces?

Mystery still surrounds Loulan, where little excavation work was carried out, and the 35 other ancient kingdoms that existed in or around Lop Nur.

The only path leading to Loulan was an arduous one 15 kilometers long, covered in dust of between 50 centimeters and 1 meter deep. Ten of the 16 jeeps in our team finally arrived at the ruins of the kingdom, with the other six having become stuck in the dust.

The kingdom is today a vast land covered in dust. The only significant architecture is a tower made of rammed soil, which is hard to recognize.

At the site, there is also a wall made of rammed soil, which was part of a house. Dozens of wooden sticks, about 2 metres tall, stand in an orderly fashion beside the wall.

Scattered everywhere are ancient potsherds and animal bones left by tomb raiders. Bent on the ground are also the dried trunks and branches of dead variform-leaved poplar trees.

Looking far into the horizon, we could see continuous giant mounds of rammed soil, which formed a magnificent sight in the sunset over the gobi.

"It is difficult to protect the ruins of Loulan, as people cannot stay in the desolate site to guard the relics," said Luo Zhewen, a member of our team and head of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage architecture preservation committee.

Meng Hangao, an archaeologist from Bayingolin, frequently patrols the site. He and two of his colleagues lived in Lop Nur most of last year, and built the Loulan Cultural Heritage Administration out of two vehicles.

More Effort

On our way out of Loulan, the wind roared harshly while dust and sand hit us until our faces were dark red. We walked for most of the way, as 14 of the 16 jeeps got stuck in the dust. The two better-equipped jeeps had to pull the rest out of more than 30 holes along the route. As well as Loulan, we also investigated the ruins of the ancient city of Yixun about 500 kilometres southwest of the Loulan ruins and 80 kilometres east of today's Ruoqiang County seat. Legend has it that Loulan residents moved to Yixun after a palace coup but all that is left of the ancient city is the remnants of a rammed earth city wall.

During the three-day trip, nang was our main food. The round crusty pancake, an everyday staple of the Uygur and Kazak people, can be preserved for months in the heat of Xinjiang and Central Asia.

The nang pancakes were still important when we drove out of Lop Nur towards Ruoqiang County in the Kumtag Desert. The motorcade had to stop again as flooding from the Altun Mountains had destroyed a road bridge.

"Never mind. We still have the nang," said a member of our team and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

(China Daily July 17, 2003)