Patriot, I saw that too last year. By Western China, they just mean North India. Of course this was before barriers were drawn up.   http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/980...rovince.lg.jpg  No. They are talking about the Xinjiang region in present day western China. Possibly further east as well. Xinjiang is where the White mummies and their settlements were found.     They have blond, brown and red hair, prominent noses and deep- set eyes. Some are nearly six feet tall. Buried along with them were textiles woven in plaid patterns strikingly similar to those of ancient European fabrics. Tests on one mummy linked it to a European genetic group     This caused a clamor in scientific circles. Conventional wisdom has long been that Western people didn't arrive in China until the establishment of the Silk Road, about 2,000 years ago. Chinese scholars have claimed, and Western scholars have agreed, that Chinese culture evolved in isolation, apart from the influence of Europe    The Caucasian mummies of the Takla Makan proved otherwise, indicating that Europeans forged eastward thousands of years before anyone thought and built a thriving agricultural society in what's now China's Xinjiang Province    The people native to this area of central Asia are a Turkic ethnic group called Uighurs (WE-gurs). They trace their ties to the region back to around 800 A.D., when their Turkic ancestors moved there and, anthropologists believe, mixed with a people known as the Tocharians.     The Tocharians, who were Buddhists, are thought to have built and ruled a string of cities along the central Asian stretch of the Silk Road. Study of Tocharian manuscripts has revealed that they used a language closely related to Celtic and Germanic tongues; their paintings reveal them to have been a fair-haired, blue-eyed people.    These distinctive characteristics have caused many scholars to link them with the mummy people, who predated them.     Ancient artworks also helped strengthen the link between the mummy people and the later Tocharians. At the top of a sheer cliff, deep in a complex of caves filled with Tocharian script, Mair found ancient paintings of fair-haired, blue-eyed people that closely resemble the mummies.    Altogether, the findings from the expedition indicate that what's now western China was in fact occupied by non-ethnically Chinese people well before the Silk Road was established, and that those people later built cities along the trade route - cities that fostered much of the important cultural exchange between East and West.