| Qiemo چەرچەن 且末 |
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| — County-level town — | |
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Qiemo
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Qiemo
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| Country | China |
| Province | Xinjiang |
| Prefecture | Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture |
| Elevation | 1,252 m (4,108 ft) |
| Postal code | 841900 |
The oasis town of Qiemo or Cherchen (Uyghur: چەرچەن, Chinese: 且末; pinyin: Qiĕmò; Uighur: Qarqan, also spelled Charchan) is the capital of Qiemo County, of the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang, China is on the Qiemo River, at the foot of the Qilian Mountains, on the old Southern Silk Route. Anciently the town, and the kingdom it controlled, were frequently known as Shanshan.
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Qiemo was strategically located at the junction of the main route from Dunhuang to Khotan via Jingjue or Cadota – the so-called “Niya site” north of modern Minfeng (also referred to as 'Niya', a route almost directly north to Korla, and another route which went south through the mountains, and around the southern shore of Qinghai Lake, and then on via Xining to eastern China.[1] Qiemo is 315 km east of Niya/Minfeng, 605 km east of Hotan, and 351 km west of Charklik/Ruoqiang Town along Highway 315.[2]
Qiemo has a very ancient history dating back to the Bronze Age at least with 2,400 year old mummies at the Zaghunluq site less than five km southwest of the city center.[2]
During the Former Han Dynasty (123 BC to AD 23), it was described in the Hanshu, chapter 96A as a having "230 households, 1610 individuals with 320 persons able to bear arms . . . . There are grapes and various types of fruit."[3] Interestingly, although the town is described in documents from the 1st century BC to the 9th century AD, the ancient site has not yet been discovered in spite of four major expeditions searching for it.[4]
This area has a truly ancient human history, based on the 3,500-year-old cemetery along the ancient 'Jade Road' that traded with the earliest Chinese dynasties and the similarly dated Bronze Age rock carvings south of town along another ancient trade route to what is now Tibet and a forgotten back door to central China.
More than a thousand years later, the area was ruled as the kingdom of Calmadana during the earliest heyday of the Silk Road. Its fortunes have since ebbed and flowed, mainly with the popularity of the southern trade route. The Chinese Buddhist monk, Faxian, left a brief account of the country after his visit c. 399 AD, recorded that there were probably more than 4,000 monks in the country, all Hinayana. Song Yun passed through about 519, who recorded that the country had just been defeated by the Tuyuhun (Tibetan: Azha). It was sometimes abandoned, as when Buddhist monk Xuanzang passed through in the year 644, and when Marco Polo came by in 1273.
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