Charklik was the name for an ancient settlement of the kingdom of
Kroraina (Chinese: Loulan; later
Shanshan) from at least as far back as 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 (), thought to have been 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 entirely desert, and which included the
salt lake known as
Lop Nor. The district contained only about five hundred households, even including the semi-nomadic herders and fishermen called 'Lopliks'. The Buddhist monk
Xuanzang passed through a town called
Na-Fu-Bo () 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, Both of these were suggested by Aurel Stein to be Charklik. Stein wrote that there was "conclusive evidence" that Charklik was already the chief centre of the region when Xuanzang passed through it. ==Description==