The Altun Mazar — Golden Graveyard — holds the mausoleums of the rulers of the Yarkand Khanate, the Uyghur state that controlled the southern Silk Road in the 16th and 17th centuries. The complex adjoins the Amanisahan mausoleum in the old city and contains a sequence of domed tombs in the Central Asian Islamic tradition, each covering the grave of a khan or a member of the royal family.
The tombs are architecturally distinctive: simple domes of whitewashed or lightly ornamented brick, with wooden carved screens over the windows and Arabic inscriptions on the facades. They are modest by the standard of the great Timurid mausoleums of Samarkand, but they belong to the same tradition, and the sequence of them arranged around the graveyard has a cumulative dignity that is striking.
This is not a tourist attraction in the organised sense — there are no audio guides or entrance fees, and the setting is that of an active Islamic graveyard with the mausoleums as its historical core. That is precisely what makes it worth visiting.