Qiemo County
The Cherchen County (Chinese: 且末; pinyin: Qiěmò) is a county under the administration of the Bayin'gholin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, bordering the Tibet Autonomous Region to the south. Its area is 138,645 square kilometres (53,531 sq mi) and, according to the 2002 census, it has a population of 60,000. The county seat is at Qiemo Town.
Name
"Qiemo (W-G: Ch'ieh-mo) 且末 = modern Cherchen or Charchan (Uyghur: Qarqan). There has been uncertainty about this name as Chavannes (1907), p. 156, and then Stein (1921a), Vol. I, 296 ff., gave an incorrect romanization for the first character. Chavannes, using the French EFEO romanisation system, gave tsiu, and Stein used the Wade-Giles equivalent, chü. In fact, the character is correctly rendered k’ie in EFEO, ch’ieh in Wade-Giles and qie in pinyin. Nevertheless, there has never been any serious dispute about its identification with modern Cherchen."
Lionel Giles has recorded the following names for Ruoqiang Town (with his Wade-Giles forms of the Chinese names converted to pinyin):