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Below maps were added to the http://www.imperialchina.org/Barbarian.htm which was embedded within the
http://www.imperialchina.org/Huns.html and
http://www.imperialchina.org/Turks_Uygurs.html
pages.
On basis of new archaeological findings and historical Chinese records, I will tentatively speculate as to when the east met with the west.
First I want to debunk the fallacies in regards to the equation of the ancient Yu-shi tribe to the Yuezhi, and the speculation on the jade trade that the Yuezhi was falsely accredited with. The forged Guan-zi [管子] statement contained a reference which was a misnomer related to 'Yu-shi' tribe, a term that was erroneously speculated by a few annotators in history, as well as Wang Guowei of the early 20th century, to be the same as Yuezhi. What Guan Zhong was alleged to have said was a statement using an ancient Chinese syntactical statement to juxtapose two equally valuable things, i.e., the jade from the Yu-shi tribe to the north versus the pearls from the Yangtze to the south. I like to point out that the Yu-shi tribe [and the Bai-di barbarian --who enjoyed the same last name as Zhou Dynasty royal court, by the way] that Qi Huan'gong campaigned against in the 7th century B.C. was right next to the Yellow River bend, not the Yuezhi that was recorded in the 3rd century B.C. as dwelling between Qilian and Dunhuang. See my discussion at tarim-mummies-and-the-introduction-of-chariots/page__st__15 Qi Lord Huan'gong's 7th cent. B.C. campaign against Bai-di and Yu-shi, a military action that the hegemony lord conducted to win the respect among the Zhou vassals on the ground of defending the Zhou Dynasty court, was an obscure record in the Chinese history. Around Xin (New) Dynasty (AD 6-23), there occurred a forgery movement by Chinese scholars, possibly with the intention of substantiating the mandate of the usurper Wang Mang's dynasty. The classics which were proved to be forgeries include "Guan-zi [管子]", which historian Ma Feibai pierced sentence by sentence. (The book "Guan-zi [管子]" was very much a polemic political economy book which centered around the statesmen’s leverage of economic policies in the rule of a country, in which extensive citations were made, albeit using the Han Dynasty and Xin Dynasty terminologies and incidents unwittingly, such as the theme of the salt-iron debates of the early Han Dynasty. See Preliminary Discussions on Forgeries in Chinese Classics for my rebuttals on the additional forged books of Guan-zi.) Using Ma's same logic, I had found the two other books, "Yi-zhou-shu" [逸周书] or "Zhou-shu" (Zhou Dynasty [16th cen. B.C. - 256 B.C.] [abbrev. 周书] book, not the Zhou-shu [周书] from Posterior Zhou Dynasty of the South-North Dynasty time period of AD 557-581) and "Shang[1]-shu" [商书] (Shang Dynasty [16-11th cent. B.C.] book, not Shang[4]-shu [尚书], i.e., remotely ancient book which was said to be abridged by Zuo Qiuming), to be written in the exact same style and could be forgeries by possibly the same person. In the apparently forged Yi-zhou-shu [逸周书] and Shang-shu [商书] books, you could find sentences redundantly listing the names of barbarian tribes and vassals as known in the Han Emperor Wudi's reign of B.C. 140-86, including the name of Yuezhi to be some alien tribe to have surrendered tributes as early as Shang Dynasty (16-11th cent. B.C.), which was quite an irony, not to mention the forgeries in conveniently penning a boundary of the central kingdom as well as the positions of various alien tribes and vassals per then-known knowledge as of the 1st century A.D. Discarding the forgery of Guan-zi [管子] basically eliminated the whole foundation upon which the existence of the Yuezhi and the jade trade was built, a fallacy which was widely cited in the most recent 10-20 years, i.e., 1990s and 2000s, to the effect that the fabricated Yuezhi had lived close to the heart of China, playing the role of bearing the Aryan civilization to China. Absent the fallacious Yu-shi and jade reference in above forged books, all the rest of Chinese classics had only one description since China's prehistory [re-written], namely, the Queen Mother of the West, i.e., the matriarchal Qiangic nation's hereditary queen and her diplomatic activities with the Sinitic China dating from the era of the Yellow Emperor [Huangdi (l. BC 2697 - 2599 ?)]. As time and space double-corroborated in Zhou King Muwang's travelogue, there was no trace of the Yuezhi people in northwestern China at the time of Zhou King Muwang, reign 1001-946 B.C., other than a wilderness of feathers extending by 1000 li distance. There was a so-called Chinese 'scholar' called Yang Boda who since 1991 claimed that the jades from the Shang tomb of Fu Hao in [Anyang of] Central China were from Khotan, and hence speculated on basis of the Guan-zi [管子] forged statement that the Yuezhi traded with China since prehistory. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in conjunction with CCTV, organized a trip with several archaeological and geological scholars onboard, straight for Khotan, Xinjiang, where there was the tall Kunlun Mountains. After making a superficial inspection, they shot a documentary series "Jade Road." Those reporters, and scholars, unfortunately, do not know what the ancient books termed the "Kunshan (Kunlun Mountain) Jade","Kun (Kunlun) Gang (hill) Jade", "Kunlun jade" all referred to the Qilian jade. Twenty years of test on jades from Xia, Shang and Zhou tombs, from which there were unearthed a large number of jade artifacts for ritual, failed to link the artifacts to the Khotan jades. The test also eliminated the source of jades as from other major jade sites such as Liaoning Xiuyan Jade in Manchuria, nor inner land jade such as Nanyang Dushan Jade in Henan Province. Mt Kunlun, in ancient China, meant for the Mt Qilianshan, with Kunlun meaning magnificent and heavenly, which the later Huns called by a similar name in their terminology, i.e., Qilian, word meaning 'Heaven'. In late Western Jinn Dynasty, 5th century A.D., Zhang Gui, a Chinese magistrate at the Western Corridor (Ganzhou [Zhangye of Gansu], Liangzhou [Wuwei of Gansu], Guazhou [east of Gansu-xian/Anxi-xian of Gansu], Shazhou [Dunhuang of Gansu]), established the Former Liang State (301-76) at the foot of Qilian Mountain. Serving under him will be a Jiuquan magistrate who pointed out that the Qilian Mountain southwest of Jiuquan would be where Zhou King Muwang met the Queen Mother of the West. At http://www.imperialchina.org/Zhou_Dynasty.html I stated that "Zhou King Muwang (r. 1001-946 BC) was a legendary figure famous for fighting in the west and maybe today's Central Asia where he met and rendezvous on Kunlun Mountain with so-called Xi Wang Mu, namely, Queen Mother of the West, rumored by the western historians, including Charles Hucker, to be Queen of Sheba. (The actual place for Kunlun Mountains would be somewhere close to today's Jiuquan County, Gansu Province.)" At http://www.imperialchina.org/Huns.html I stated that Zhou King Muwang was noted for defeating the barbarians, reaching Qinhai-Gansu regions in the west, meeting with Queen Mother of West on Mt Kunlun [possibly around Dunhuang area], and then relocating the barbarians eastward to the starting point of Jing-shui River for better management [in a similar fashion to Han Emperor Wudi's relocating Southern Huns to the south of the north Yellow River Bend]." (At the upperstream Weishui and Jingshui, there was a yellow mud plateau named the Queen Mother Palace where Xu Haidong's Red Army fought a battle.) 
I never thought the people of the Central Asia or in Chinese Turkestan were an intermediary form of human evolution, which was my basis of calling the Siberian origin of Koreans by a 'moo' point. I constantly pointed out that in the collective memory of Sino-Tibetan, that passed down by generations, the Sinitic Chinese had forgot they travelled north from today's Vietnam while claiming a walk down Mt Kunlun. Previously, I checked the historical context as well as the geo situation to find out when the east met with the west, and believed that the Hun-Yuezhi War could be the start of the contact. With new archeological findings, I would add that the proto-Tibetan Qiangs had indeed penetrated into Chinese Turkestan, to the north side of Mt Tianshan, from perhaps the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert. Click on the below picture for the enlarged map showing the first Hunnic attack at the Yuezhi around the ancient Juyan Lake (also known as the West Sea in Chinese classics, and later known as the Kharakoto [Blackwater] Lake) in the 3rd century B.C., and the subsequent Hunnic attack at the Wusun/Loulan near Yiwu in the 2nd century B.C., to the east of Turpan, which triggered the Wusun migration to Ili where they further drove the Yuezhi towards today's Afghanistan. The exact timeline is like this: The Huns under Mote Chanyu first defeated the Eastern Hu nomads in 206 BC, then attacked the Yuezhi to the west, which triggered the Yuezhi's chain reaction against the Wusun, killing the Wusun king, and the Huns possibly took control of the Western Corridor [He-xi Corridor] by that time. Mote Chanyu took custody of the Wusun prince and allocated the land in western territories to Wusun; however, the new Wusun king, after growing up, distanced himself from the Huns. The Huns attacked to the west around 176 BC, hence defeating Loulan, Wusun and Hujie etc, in a battle near today's Yiwu per Yu Taishan, and taking control of 26 statelets in Chinese Turkistan. In 174 BC, the newly-enthroned Chanyu Laoshang sent scouts in search of the Yuezhi and mounted another campaign against the Yuezhi, killed the Yuezhi king, and made the king's skull as a drinking utensil. The Yuezhi queen acted as a regent and led her people in a further move to the west. Yuezhi, in turn, attacked the Scythians in Ili River area, hence dwelling at the Ili River and the Chu-he River [from the Ili and Chuhe river basins in the east to the Sir (Syrdarya) River valley]. At the time of Junchen Chanyu, the Yuezhi, under the attack of possibly the Wusun-Hun alliance, relocated south to today's Afghanistan. 
On the modern map, there was a tiny corridor between Chinese Turkistan and China, which was the narrow strip of sand to the east of Hami. However, this corridor could be a recent event. There was the historical DAZI blackhole desert to the east, nowadays called by the generic name GOBI. The ancient Mongoloid migration into Tianshan Mountain could have come north from south, i.e., the Tibetan Plateau/Ruoqiang direction to the south --though I hesitated about the passibility of the "Liu-sha" flowing sand desert between Ruoqiang and Loulan (Lop Nur), which was another tiny corridor noticeable on the modern map. Judging from Han Dynasty emissary Zhang Qian's change of mind on his return trip to go home along the Hami strip rather than going straight east across the Qiang-zhong or the middle Qiang nation land, we could tell that the northern strip was perhaps the most traveler-friendly. (Could Zhang Qian change his mind in the hope of sneaking into the Hunnic territory to see the child he had with the Hun woman?) That was Han Emperor Wudi's reign of B.C. 140-86, i.e., 140 BC and later, much later than Hun-Yuezhi wars. While we don't know exactly what path Zhang Qian took to go west, noting he was caught by the Huns and had stay with the Huns for a dozen years, we could speculate that he must have taken the "safe" and "passible" path to the north, i.e., the path the Yuezhi exodus had taken, near the Tianshan and Altaic mountain ranges. We do know from his self account what path he took to return to China. Zhang took the path along the edge of the Kunlun Mountain, i.e., the southern edge of the Tarim basin/desert, and then along the Altun (Ah-er-Jin) Mountain, intending to then move through the "Qiang zhong", i.e., the middle Qiangic land, which was south of Qilian. Zhang's interest was to check out the source of the Yellow River, and he confirmed that there were two river systems in Chinese Turkistan, i.e., the west-to-east Tarim River flowing down the Pamirs, and the south-to-north Hotien River flowing down the "Nan shan" (southern mountain) which was what we Chinese called by Kunlun Mountain. However, Zhang Qian then changed mind, and in lieu of going east, he traveled north around the Lop Nur (Luobupuo area), passing the Loulan land for Gushi, which was between Loulan and today's Urumqi. On this northbound road, Zhang Qian was caught by the Huns again. (In Chinese records, same names were applied to mountains in and outside of the domain: the "Nan shan" [southern mountain] was commonly used for the Qilian Mountain range which was itself originally named Mt. Kunlun, meaning magnificent and heavenly in Chinese, till the time the Huns defeated the Yuezhi at Lake Juyan to the north and took over the western corridor, and renamed the mountain to Qilian, meaning heavenly in Hunnic terminology. After Zhang Qian's trip to the west, the "Nan shan" [southern mountain] came to denote the current Kunlun Mountain that ran straight into Tibet from the Pamirs, after Han Emperor Wudi [B.C. 140-86] personally termed the newly-imported Khotan jade as the Kunlun Jade, i.e., an archaic name. Chinese, in addition, named the present Tianshan [heavenly] Mountain of Chinese Turkestan as the "Bei shan" (northern mountain], and the Altaic Mountain by Jinshan [gold mountain] --where the later Turkic word Altay was meant for 'gold'.) What Gen. Li Guangli did was another interesting matter worthy of noting. With Zhang Qian walking the circle around Loulan and the Lop Nur (Luobupuo area), it was not hard to figure out the depth and radius of the "Liu Sha (Kumtag)" flowing sand desert. Hence, with the "pierce vacuum" knowledge, Gen. Li Guangli FORCEFULLY took the straight path across the flowing sand desert. In the first trip, he lost majority of his troops to both the desert and the fighting against the natives living to the west of the Lop Nur (Luobupuo area), i.e., so-called Peacock River or Salty River, a parallel river to the Tarim River, which ended dead in the sand, and was known as so-called "salt lake" or "Puchang Sea", with a wild claim, also carried in the Mountain and Sea Legends, that the water, including that from the Pamir-Tarim flow, disappeared into the ground at the Lop Nur (Luobupuo area) and flowed below earth's surface to re-appear as the source of the water for the Yellow River. After Han Wudi Wudi [B.C. 140-86] defeated the Huns, first time ever, China built forts and stationed farming soldiers straight west towards the Salty Lake direction, which was a shortcut undoubtedly and later went into oblivion when Han Dynasty's imperial power subsided over the Chinese Turkestan. Now, let's talk about human migration. There were widespread discussions of 'Caucasoid' mummies in Chinese Turkestan, with 'Loulan Beaty' purportedly dated 2000 B.C., while the southern 'cousins' in Khotan area dated 100-300 B.C. The timeline suggested a move from north to south, not west to east. The 2000 B.C. Caucasoid mummies found in Loulan, in the Turpan Depression/Kumtag Desert, in-between Altaic/Tianshan Mountains and the Altun Mountain (Ruoqiang), could be the Indo-European people coming from the north of the Altaic Mountain [the Mongol Altaic Mountain of today], near the Alfanesevo bronze culture. Yuezhi could be of this group of people coming from north. Further diggings in Loulan area, i.e., the ancient Salty Lake and Salty River (Peacock Rover), led to a site called by Xiaohe or the Little River, next to the Salty River (Peacock Rover), where Mongoloid Mummies were discovered. It appears to me there was indeed good carbon dating on Xiaohe excavation, saying "The entire necropolis can be divided, based on the archeological materials, into earlier and later layers. Radiocarbon measurement (14C) dates the lowest layer of occupation to around 3980 ± 40 BP (personal communications; calibrated and measured by Wu Xiaohong, Head of the Laboratory of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Peking University), which is older than that of the Gumugou cemetery (dated to 3800)." The article claimed that the 'Mongoloid' mtDNA had similarity to some present South Siberian population. (For details, check http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/8/15 for the full article "Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age".) The linking of this certain mtDNA in Xiaohe/Loulan area to a modern Siberian population could be said to be circumvential at best since a lot of things had happened in the past 2-3000 years. It kind of had the same timing as the Mongoloid mummies that were discovered to the north and east of the Tianshan Mountain. More than what was found about the mtDNA at Xiaohe/Loulan, there were mummies of Khams Tibetan type found to the further north, at the Tianshan-Altaic mountain areas, which presented a much more convincing point that the proto-Tibetan Qiangs had indeed crossed over the strip of the sand desert near Loulan to reach the north side of Tianshan. Possibly, the Khams [proto-]Tibetan, after reaching Tianshan Mountain Range, moved towards Hami (Qumul) to the east, where there were the Hami (Qumul) Mongoloid mummies excavated. Note that today's Kham Tibetans were not far away from the historical Sanxingdui (three star) Excavations in western Sichuan, that was discovered by Gaway Hann (an American professor of the former Huaxi University), a Neolithic/Bronze culture dating from about 4800 to 2800 years ago, as well as a bridge providing Southwest China's tin to the Shang dynasty and the Zhou dynasty. It could be possible that the Loulan area had seen settlements rise and fall several times in ancient times. The Peacock River that flows into the Lop Nur Lake was known as the salty water river, and the lake was named the Salty Lake. While the water coming down the mountain may not be salty, the salty lake did not portend to be a source of fresh water supply that could supply any civilization. My point was that Loulan area was not a permanent settlement. Either the Indo-Europeans had come earlier than the Khams [proto-]Tibetans, or the Khams [proto-]Tibetans earlier than the Indo-Europeans. I found this guy, Jan Romgard, to have read much more about this mummy topic, and gave a much sounder presentation. See http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp185_silk_road.pdf. I spent some time reading "SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS". What it said was that "the Yanbulake site excavated in the mid 1980s, eight out of 29 examined skeletons were estimated to be of Caucasian origin while the others were defined as Mongoloid, or to be more specific, 'similar' to the 'Khams Tibetan type'." What he cited was the research showing that the so-called "Asian" mtDNA mummies were related to Khams Tibetans, "a group within the ethnic Tibetan community situated in eastern Tibet" today. My reasoning was that the Qiangs had a dominance in the area since China's prehistory, like 5000 years ago, at least the time of the Yellow Emperor [Huangdi (l. BC 2697 - 2599 ?)], and they controlled the southern rim, southeastern rim and western rim of the Taklamakan Desert, and somehow around 2000 B.C., penetrated northward to reach the two sides of the Tianshan mountain range, while the so-called Caucasoid oases in their path, namely, the Loulan area, might have risen and fallen numerous times in history -- if they ever existed there prior to the penetration by the Khams [proto-]Tibetans. Or the other way around, the Khams [proto-]Tibetans could be speculated to have penetrated to the two sides of the Tianshan mountain range earlier than the Indo-Europeans, and subsequently encountered the Indo-Europeans near the Tianshan Mountain, and ultimately the Indo-Europeans gradually dominated over the area and eliminated the trace of the Khams [proto-]Tibetans, pressing them back to the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert. According to Sima Qian, the 'San Miao' people, who resided in the land where the later Chu Statelet was, were mostly relocated to western China to guard against the western border, i.e., LIU-SHA (drift sand), known as Kumtag today, with borderline covering the Blackwater Lake at today's Mongolia border (which was disputed by Chen Ping to mean the Blackwater River to the south of Qilian and near the Bailongjiang River of Sichuan --a seismically active place Xu Xiangqian's Red Army travelled through). Lord Shun (l. 2257 - 2208 BC ?) relocated them to western China as a punishment for their aiding Dan Zhu (the son of Lord Yao) in rebellion. To the west of today's Dunhuang of Gansu Province was a mountain named 'San Wei Shan' where the Three Miao peoples were exiled. ('San Wei Shan' literally meant for the San-miao Precarious Mountain.) This could lead to a sound speculation that Sino-Tibetan speaking San Miao people had dwelled in Gansu much earlier than the later Indo-European Yuezhi people --should they had ever moved east to the Juyan Lake at all to be in conflict with the Huns in the 3rd century B.C. The approximate date would be about 2258 BC for the San Miao relocation. The San-miao migration was an epic that was extensively researched by Feng Shi, Bian Ren and Chen Ping et al [the ranks among whom could have been the most notorious forgery generation of the P.R.C. in the late 20th century]. While the route of research in linking the excavated ancient pictagraphs [ ! possibly a forgery ! ] on the Shandong peninsula to Southwest China's Yi-zu minority writing was tenuous, the extrapolations on basis of historical namings of the Dong-yi statelets and tribes as well as the historical namings of places in Anhui-Henan-Hubei tri-provincial areas are sound enough to trace the ancient tribal migrations to derive conclusions i) that the ancient Chi-you Tribe was the Dong-yi people who migrated towards Anhui-Henan-Hubei to mix up with the San-miao people at the Yangtze; ii) that elements of the Dong-yi tribes joined the San-miao's exile towards Northwest China where they developed into the later Xian-yun barbarians (Huns) as well as co-mingled with the natives to become the ancient Jiang-rong; and iii) that a branch of the San-miao/Dong-yi exiles moved south to Southwest China to become the Di-qiang barbarians and today's Yi-zu minority people. (As Wang Zhonghan had researched, the ancient Huns belonged to the Jiang-rong group, not the Tungunsic group that attacked west from Manchuria. In this sense, no matter the Mongoloid mummies in Chinese Turkestan were linked to today's South Siberian people or today's Kham (Xi-kang) Tibetans, they could all be traced to the original San-miao exile epic.) There was a striking similarity between the Mongol attack at the Tanguts in the 13th cent. A.D. and the Hun attack at the Yuezhi in the 3rd cent. B.C. Both took the desert road towards the Blackwater Lake. It kind of gives you a picture how the Huns first raided to the west against the Yuezhi, forcing the Yuezhi Major to flee west while the elderly and the children, i.e., the Yuezhi Minor, crossed the Qilian mountain to seek asylum with the Qiangs, and per Yu Taishan, continued to move on towards the southeastern rim of the Taklamakan Desert, towards Khotan where the people were recorded to be Mongoloid, i.e., Hua-xia-looking, throughout China's Han and Tang dynastic records, till annihilated sometime during the Islamic invasion of the Buddhist stronghold of Khotan or possibly during the earlier Turkic-Uygur conquest of the Chinese Turkistan. (Note the discovery of the so-called 100-300 BC Caucasoid in Khotan, which matched with the escape timeframe of the Yuezhi Minor.) 
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