Kingdom of Charklik
 Shown within China
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| Location |
 China
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| Region | Xinjiang |
| Coordinates | 39°02′00″N 88°00′00″E / 39.033333°N 88°E |
Charklik or Charkhlik, was the Uighur name of an ancient settlement located in what is now officially called by its modern Chinese name Ruoqiang County, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.
Charklik was the name for an ancient settlement that was located in modern Ruoqiang County in Xinjiang. It was part of the kingdom of Loulan (later renamed Shanshan) from at least the 1st century BCE.
During the latter part of the Former Han and throughout the Later Han the capital of the kingdom of Shanshan was known as Yüni (扜泥), which is thought to be located near the present town of Ruoqiang at Charklik.
The explorer and archaeologist Aurel Stein visited the small oasis of Charklik in 1906, where he found a little village that was the official headquarters of a very large district, almost all desert, and including the salt lake known as Lop Nor. The district, however, only contained about five hundred households, even including the semi-nomadic herders and fishermen called 'Lopliks'.
It was recorded that the Buddhist monk Xuanzang passed through a town called Na-Fu-Bo (纳缚波) on his way home to China in 645 CE, and Marco Polo in the 13th century passed through a place he called the town of Lop, and both of these were suggested by Aurel Stein to be Charklik. Stein indicated that there is "conclusive evidence" that Charklik was already the chief centre of the region when Xuanzang passed through the town.
At various times in history Charklik was the last stop on the difficult Southern Silk Road from Khotan before crossing the much-feared salt pans of Lop Nor to Dunhuang. An alternate route from modern Charklik heads south through the Qaidam Desert which then turns northeast to Dunhuang, or south to Lhasa. There is also an ancient route leading north across the Taklamakan Desert to Korla. Northeast of the town of Ruoqiang is the important archaeological site of Miran.
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