Khara-Khoto, aka the 'black city', is a ghost town haunted by history. Its ruins bear testimony to life and death in the desert, and commerce and conflict along the Silk Road, Erik Nilsson reports.

A camel rests in the desert outside the ancient settlement. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

The dead city of Khara-Khoto's legacy lives on in the Gobi. So, too, do its ghosts, according to - and certainly in - local legend.

They're said to stalk the desert garrison's ruins - remnants that are literally shaped by the sands of time.

Centuries of sandstorms have ground many structures into nubs. And shifting dunes intermittently swallow and spit them out, concealing and revealing different edifices according to the appetites of fickle winds.

And Khara-Khoto's name has again been carried by the breeze to captivate the imaginations of travelers from afar.

Fascination with the site has been reincarnated since the rediscovery of the long-lost fortress and trade hub early last century.

Many experts believe the Tangut settlement in today's Inner Mongolia autonomous region is the ancient city of Etzina referenced in Marco Polo's travelogue.

"At this city, you must (prepare) victuals for 40 days, because, when you quit Etzina, you enter a desert that extends 40 days' journey to the north, and on which you meet with no habitation or baiting place," he wrote.

The explorer also records that inhabitants were "idolaters", who primarily survived by herding cattle and camels.

Many were soldiers, who protected traders from further east in China and countries to the west from nomadic raiders, who plundered Silk Road caravans.

These outlaws were, essentially, pirates who attacked from horseback, rather than from aboard ships, to pillage camel cargos sailing over seas of sand.

Khara-Khoto, which means "dark castle" in the local language - aka Heicheng (black city) in Chinese - was built in 1032.

Two stupas are framed by a hole in a crumbling wall in Khara-Khoto's ruins. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Genghis Khan conquered it in 1226. The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) laid the last siege in 1327, after which the fortress was ultimately abandoned.

The stronghold's weak point is that it relied on the Ejin River as its sole water source.

It's said Genghis Khan's forces surrounded the city and diverted the waterway.

The besieged residents frantically dug hundreds of meters into the ground.

When they failed to find water, their leader, Khara Bator - the "black general" - poured the city's vast treasure into the well to conceal their riches from the invaders.

Their last hope for discovering water to sustain their resistance had initially seemed to be in vain. But while it didn't save their lives, it saved their wealth from their killers.

It's said the only thing Genghis Khan's troops found upon breaching the ramparts was a bizarre serpent, which was believed to be an evil spirit - specifically, the black general's poltergeist.

Lore holds he still prowls the ruins.

One version of his story says that, upon realizing the inevitability of defeat, Khara Bator killed his family and then himself.

In an alternative take, he fought to the bitter end.

And, in yet another, he escaped through the fortress' wall.

Supporters of the escape theory point to a manmade passage bored into the 9-meter-high, nearly 4-meter-thick outer bulwark that's large enough to accommodate such a stunt.

The Strange Forest hosts hundreds of ancient poplars preserved for millennia by the desiccation that killed them. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Genghis Khan's grandson, Kublai Khan, who founded the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), increased the strategic outpost's size threefold.

But it was abandoned when Ming troops again diverted the Ejin.

The fact that Khara-Khoto was hundreds of kilometers from, and years since, habitation meant it was all but forgotten until early last century.

Russian explorers had heard whispers of this city deserted in the desert and staged an expedition to see if the myths were true.

They excavated thousands of Tangut texts, Buddhist artifacts and woodcuts in 1908 and 1909.

Other foreigners followed - from Sweden, the United States, Britain and Japan.

But while people from faraway lands made international journeys to the remote site throughout the last century, until recent decades, many people from places nearest the ruins refused to go near them for fear of ghosts - especially the malicious phantom of the black general.

His legend has lived on in ethnic Mongolian folk-music epics that still indulge such apprehensions.

Over 3,000 more writings, artworks and daily-use items were removed by Chinese expeditions in the early 1980s, essentially confiscating the last of Khara-Khoto's known artifacts aside from the buildings themselves.

Still, the structures reveal much about the people who dwelled in them.

Wooden posts poke out of the crumbling foundations of ordinary residents' earthen houses.

An 18-meter-high Tibetan stupa that juts from the city's bulwark - the highest structure - hails a veneration of Buddhism.

The only building that stands outside the walls appears to be a mosque that may have largely served traders from India and other countries to the west.

And the ruins are bordered by a strange sort of graveyard - a cemetery of poplars preserved like mummies for millennia by the very desiccation that killed them.

The shriveled skeletons of ancient trees appear as if contorted in their death throes in the Strange Forest, as the deadwoods are called today.

Twisted branches stretch toward the sky like the arms of the knowingly doomed.

Signage bestows the thickets with such glum names as Watching War Machine, Life Depends on Death and God of War.

The trees serve as their own grave markers in a bone yard of white wood that casts an eerie pall on the "black city" - a ghost town haunted by history, whose spirit shines once more in a new age.

Contact the writer at erik_nilsson@chinadaily.com.cn