In the Chinese province of Shanxi, in a tomb of the Tang dynasty, paintings depicting scenes from the daily lives of the dead are found. In one of these scenes a blonde man appears. Looking at the color of the hair and the facial expression, archaeologists who have studied the tomb say that it probably did not belong to the Han ethnicity, but they have not made any other hypothesis.

On the other hand, the historian Victor Xiong (Western Michigan University), who has not participated in the study, has taken into account, in addition to the physical characteristics, the character's milking and concludes that this man could have been Sogdian, that is, that he had his origin in the current Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.