
Loulan Kingdom - benbreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loulan_Kingdom
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alehul
This seems like a fascinating place.

It's remarkable to google historical places like this and see just how little
there is available on the internet, which we usually attribute with holding
most of the world's information (the top results for 'Loulan Kingdom' are for
tours).

After naively believing for years that I could find all information worth
knowing on the web, I've started reading more books, which seem to hold so
much knowledge with purely offline sources, gathered by interested academics
over decades. Hopefully there are some on this kingdom.

~~~
ashark
As soon as I get beyond surface-level info on almost anything, I find a lot of
the good stuff is locked away in academic books and papers. Papers aren't as
big a problem these days (ahem) but books remain difficult. You don't even
have to go that far off the beaten path, depending on the topic, to end up at
"You need this book. There are four copies in libraries. All are in Europe. It
hasn't been digitized. Good luck. Oh BTW hope you can read German."

~~~
ch4s3
It's a real tragedy that more old books haven't been digitized. I wonder to
what extent US copyright law has had a chilling effect on digitization.

~~~
riffraff
this[0] has been on HN some time ago, discussing google's effort to digitize a
ton of books.

“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and
nobody is allowed to read them.”

[0]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-
tragedy-of-google-books/523320/)

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keepsimple
I am curious why this article pops up in Hacker News.

Grew up in China, some of my childhood stories are related to Loulan, a
mysterious place. Glad to read about it here.

