The Hotan Cultural Museum is the best place to understand what this city was before the Islamic conversion of the 10th century swept away the Buddhist civilisation that had thrived here for centuries. The collection draws on excavations at the lost cities buried in the Taklamakan — Niya, Dandan Oilik, Rawak — sites that were rediscovered by European explorers in the late 19th century and subsequently excavated by Aurel Stein and others, much of whose finds went to London and Delhi.
The displays cover the Buddhist period in depth: sculptures, terracotta figures, silk fragments with Chinese, Kharosthi, and local script inscriptions, and painted wooden panels from the temples at Dandan Oilik that show a hybrid art drawing on Indian Buddhist iconography filtered through a distinctively Central Asian sensibility. The jade section traces the history of the trade from ancient Chinese court records to the present, with examples of raw stone alongside carved imperial-era pieces.
The museum is well laid out and the labelling, though primarily in Chinese, has some English. It is not a world-class institution in terms of its holdings — the best material was taken by Stein and others — but what remains is genuinely important, and the context it provides for the ruins and markets outside makes the whole visit to Hotan more meaningful.