Khotan

Samir turned back to the crowd and nodded at a straight-faced horseman, who said, “I heard about the Rogue Legion, and those guys in Khotan really hated the saddles you sold them.”

“If the funding drops, all of that momentum will be lost,” said Khotan Harmon, senior program officer for the city of Austin.

When foreign archaeologists found an ancient town, they defined it by longitude and latitude, and then tried to match its site with one of Xuanzang’s vanished cities: Khotan, Kucha, Agni.

On his other he carried a plain gym bag with a folded 3-by-6-foot Khotan carpet woven in the East Turkestan region of Central Asia circa 1800, worth about $60,000.

A chinoiserie table purchased at the venerable San Francisco shop Gump’s in the ’20s by Goldwyn’s maternal grandfather, the Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist Sidney Howard, sits atop the den’s pale Khotan rug.