secrets of the silk road

Mummies just might be the number one object that comes to mind when one thinks about museums, and especially those from Egypt. But what about the others? Say, from western China? Up until last week, a traveling exhibit titled Secrets of the Silk Road was the only way to see these mummies, naturally preserved I might add, outside of China. But now, at the request of the Chinese government, they are back home, with their last museum stop cut short just days before its grand opening.

Since last summer, the exhibit had already traveled from the University of Southern California to the Houston Museum of Natural Science and was just ready for opening at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology when the museum was unexpectedly notified that it could not display the objects and instead would have to ship them back. The museum apparently complied with this and as a replacement opened the exhibit with photographs of the objects. In addition, the museum re-created "dummy mummies" of paper mache-- a 14-year-old visitor could not tell the difference between it and the "real thing". They also kept the live camels out as part of the opening. Hmm. So why were the objects (supposedly) sent home? The museum will not explicitly say.

One reason is that through the DNA testing that is usually conducted on archaeological finds, these mummified humans were found to not be ethnically Chinese. On top of that, they come from the separatist Uighur region in western China, Xinjiang, and some speculate that the Chinese did not want bad press or extra support for Uighur claims of autonomy.

Whatever the reason, it is quite an unfortunate situation for the Penn Museum who spent about 2 million dollars to bring in this exhibit, and who had to refund $50,000 of pre-purchased tickets to visitors.