Hotan delivers much of what you'd expect a Silk Road oasis town to deliver: jade, silk, carpets, lively markets, colorful bazaars and ancient desert ruins. It's also a long way from anywhere else you're likely to want to be: Kashgar is almost 2000 km away as the bus rolls, and Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi is on the other side of the Talkamakan Desert and the Tian Shan mountain range.

If you're looking to really get away from it all, Hotan's hard to beat; on the other hand, if your idea of "getting away from it all" involves luxury accomodations and five-star restaurants, this might be the last place you want to find yourself. Along with the expected goods, you'll find plenty of surprises if you give Hotan half a chance—grape arbors bordering rugged desert, chance finds at the traditional Sunday Market, a pair of Indo-European mummies at the Hotan Cultural Museum, and the outlying ruins of the ancient cities of Yotkan and Melikawat where you just might find a shard of ancient pottery in the shifting desert sands.
 

The Hotan area has produced nephrite jade for an astonishing 5,000-some years, and evidence of a succession of settlements in the area continue to yield valuable archaeological finds, often well preserved thanks to the dry desert climate. By the third millenium BC, Chinese traders were in frequent contact with the area's inhabitants, many of whom were Caucasoid in appearance, having migrated eastward over the centuries; today, you'll still see local faces more European or Persian in appearance than Chinese. 

Hotan's famous jade, much of it pulled from the Jade Dragon River where you can still find the odd chunk or two, enriched its leaders, who expanded their base of wealth through trade and the development of a silk industry that endures to this day. The Southern Silk Road, cutting south around the deadly Taklamakan Desert, kept Hotan connected to distant centers of civilization, from Rome to Xi'an and beyond, and allowed a succession of local kingdoms to flourish. Even as Chinese power extended west, the remote trading center retained a high degree of autonomy. 

Among the more notable of those kingdoms was the Kingdom of Khotan (known to the Chinese as Yutian), which was one of the earliest Buddhist states, allegedly having been founded in the third century BC by a son of the great Indian ruler Ashoka. By this time, Khotan had obtained the secret of silk-making from the Chinese, and its mulberry groves and silkworms gained in fame along with carpets and jade.

By the 11th century, Islam had displaced Buddhism, and when Marco Polo came through in the 1270s, he remarked in his journal that the entire area was "Mohammedan." Though the region continued to remain largely under the sway of China, it has always retained a reputation for independence, participating in a number of revolts against various dynasties throughout the years, the most notable being the Dungan uprising against the Qing (1864-1875).

Today, the city of over 100,000 is a mixture of Muslim Uighur, Han Chinese and various ethnic minorities.
 

Hot and dry in the summer, Hotan is most pleasant between May and October every year. Winters are bearable, though the difference in temperature between a sunny day and the dark desert night can come as a real shock. Even in summer, it's best to be prepared for cool nights. Annual average temperature is 12º C (54º F).