yinan wang
王一男

Kárangoták

35mm, b&w

2009

​

Photographs taken during two visits to Kárangoták, winter 2007 and summer 2008.

​

The British-Hungarian archaeologist and explorer Aurel Stein described this remote region of the Kunlun Mountains in his 1933 book On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks:​

​

“I have described elsewhere the difficulties… These difficulties were not entirely those of Nature. They were caused quite as much also by obstruction on the part of the small settlement of semi-nomadic hillmen and select malefactors exiled from Khotan who, counting probably less than two hundred souls, form the only population in this desolate mountain region. There seemed significance in its general name Karanghu-tagh, “the mountains of blinding darkness.”

 

— ​Aurel Stein, On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks (1933)