The Dead City of Khara-Khoto

The first English translation, 101 years after publication.The Mongols called it Khara-Khoto, the black city. It sat alone in the Gobi desert behind its own walls, empty for five hundred years, with the sand drifting up over the top. Caravans passed by without going in. In 1908 a Russian explorer named Pyotr Kozlov found a guide who would take him inside, and he began to dig.He found a library. Just outside the western wall stood a stupa, a domed Buddhist shrine. Kozlov's men opened it and lifted out thousands of books and manuscripts, along with paintings, coins, and statues of the dead city's gods. The books were written in Tangut, a language almost no one could still read. It remains the largest find of its kind in Central Asia, and it fills only the first part of this book.The expedition kept going. It spent the winter in Amdo, on the Tibetan border. It measured the depth of Lake Kuku-Nor, which no one had done before. And at the monastery of Kumbum, Kozlov spent two weeks talking with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who was living there in exile.The books went to St Petersburg, where scholars are still reading them. The city is still in the sand.Berlin, 1925, from Kozlov's Russian, in the authorised edition Wilhelm Filchner edited with a foreword by Sven Hedin. Never into English until now. Translated complete: the foreword, Filchner's introduction, the fifteen chapters, the appendix on Tibet, 183 notes, 127 illustrations and three maps redrawn in English.Lost Texts Press publishes first English editions of books that have existed in another language for a century or more. Each is translated complete rather than abridged. The author's own notes are preserved in full and kept separate from the editors'. Where the original page could not be read, that is recorded rather…