When "Secrets of the Silk Road" opens at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
on Saturday, much of the show truly will be secret — because no ancient
artifacts will be on display following a last-minute request from
Chinese officials not to show them. In fact, the decision itself is
shrouded in secrecy: A museum spokesperson declined to say why China
doesn't want the objects displayed or which officials requested their
removal. Yet there is much speculation that at the heart of the matter
are three ancient mummies and their connection to ethnic controversies
in China.

The Penn Museum had advertised the show as including "spectacularly
preserved clothing and textiles, personal items and golden treasures,
all recently excavated at desert burial sites in the far western reaches
of modern China," the New York Times reports.
But yesterday the museum announced that none of those items will be
displayed. Instead, the show will feature only photos, multimedia
presentations, and a re-created excavation site. The museum will refund
any tickets purchased ahead of time, and now the drastically scaled-back
exhibition will be free of charge with regular museum admission.

The show's star attractions were to have been three mummies that were
excavated in western China's Tarim Basin. Hundreds of Bronze Age mummies
have been found in the area, their bodies well-preserved by a dry
climate and salty soil. Remarkably, they have been identified as having
Causasoid features, such as long noses and red or blond hair, indicating
that Caucasians came to the region far earlier than previously thought
and suggesting much older origins for the exchange of goods and ideas
between East and West along the Silk Road.

As the Los Angeles Times reported last fall,
for decades the Chinese government made it difficult to study the
mummies, even confiscating DNA samples that Western scientists had
obtained with official permission. But, finally, Chinese and Western
scientists were able to conclusively identify the genetic makeup of the
remains as European.

This same area of western China has also been home to recent ethnic separatist stirrings from the Uighurs,
a Turkic-speaking Muslim group of nine million people. While the Uighur
separatist movement has pointed to the mummies to support their
historical claims to the region, the genetic study disproved any direct
link (although the mummies's descendants may later have blended into the
Uighur population).

The exhibition was organized by the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, and was shown both there and at the Houston Museum of Natural Science without incident before traveling to Philadelphia, its only East Coast stop. The Penn Museum web site
explains that this weekend visitors will still be able to ride a camel,
get a henna tattoo, or make their own Silk Road sunglasses, but they
won't be able to look at the mummies and their ancient accoutrements
first-hand.