Hedin, Sven

"Sven Hedin more or less stumbled upon Lou lan. On March 28 1900, while his caravan was slowly moving south through the Lop desert, his servant Ördek, having been sent to recover a spade lost in the desert, returned telling him that he had encountered ruins of settlements in the desert. Sven Hedin had no time to remain then to find out what his servant actually found, but realising the likely significance of the discovery to his efforts to solve the Lop Nor riddle, he immediately made up his plans to return to the site as soon as possible.
In less than a year, 4-10 March 1901, he was back for a short period to study what was to identified as Lou lan, an area of dispersed, ruined settlements of varying antiquity. This time he made a fair survey of the area, without, however, having time to fully grasp its extent. Since he wanted to ascertain when Lou lan was occupied and when it had been deserted he was particularly keen to find dokuments that could provide him with such information. His servants were promised special rewards if documents were found, an offer that had effect. In what had been a Chinese administrative building documents were discovered; totally 117 ones on wood and 115 documents, or fragments of documents, on paper, all with Chinese texts - one wooden document in addition having a Kharoshti inscription. Finally there were 98 small fragments on paper." Wahlquist, 1998.

Hedin, Sven
Bergman. Folke
Conrady, August, 1920 Die Chinesischen Handschriften- und Sonstigen Kleinfunde Sven Hedins in Lou-Lan. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und unter Benutzung von Karl Himlys hinterlassenen vorarbeiten. Stockholm, Generalstabens Litografiska anstalt.
Wahlquist, Håkan, 1998 Sven Hedin and the Docuemnts from Lou lan, unpublished ms.