European and Japanese adventurers followed in his footsteps, gambling with their lives by braving torrid heat and sandstorms in the hope of unearthing more relics from the ancient kingdom. Since Stein's expedition, Niya's past has intrigued archaeologists worldwide. On clay seals on the wooden covering of the tablets, Stein saw depictions of Greek gods, including Eros, Athena and Hercules. He found documents written on wooden tablets in the long-dead Kharoshthi language. Stein pillaged Greek-style furniture from the houses. In a town centered on the Buddhist shrine, or stupa - a legacy of the spread of Buddhism from India to the southeast in the 1st century A.D.

Led by a local Uyghur camel driver, the Stein expedition was the first from modern Europe to find the place and reveal the multicultural nature of Niya. If Alexander's troops reached Niya, that might account for the Hellenistic style of furniture found there by British explorer Aurel Stein in 1901. One of Alexander's expeditionary forces disappeared in the region, legend says. According to scholars, Niya's population included soldiers of Macedonia's Alexander the Great, known to have spread Hellenistic culture throughout much of the ancient world and to have reached the Pamir Mountains just west of Niya during the 4th century B.C.

Ideas and cultural traditions also flowed both ways. Camel caravans carried Chinese silk, tea and porcelain west and brought European gold, glassware and silver east. The urban center was a major stop on the Silk Road, the long, overland trading route that linked the two great civilizations of Han China and the Roman Empire. Niya was a small, landlocked yet cosmopolitan city-state where ancient Chinese peoples and cultures blended with those of India, Persia and Macedonia. This was the once-lost urban center of the Kingdom of Niya, amply chronicled under the name Jing-jue during the Chinese Han period (206 B.C. In the middle of the ghost town was a 20-foot-high Buddhist shrine made of sun-dried mud bricks. We found irrigation canals that once diverted the river to water crops. There were stables, graves, reservoirs and even a bridge over the bone-dry bed of the Niya River, which watered the city during a happier climate.

We found houses with courtyards harboring dead fruit trees and shriveled grape vines. Our expedition was the only sign of life for miles, yet we could see remains of more than 70 wooden structures. At last, our caravan of three trucks and 30 camels entered the ruins of a city where time stopped about 1,500 years ago. For three hot, dry days, we trekked into the sands of western China's forbidding Taklimakan Desert.

Forest village caravan stables