oraculum Iovis inter aestuosi / et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum…

Between the oracle of sweltering Jupiter / and the sacred tomb of ancient Battus…

(Catullus Carmen 7)

An overtly ambitious attempt to explore the backstreets of Guangzhou in the most sultry of summer weeks has been foiled, with the tumid humidity bursting into a thunderstorm now lashing the city’s old town. Luckily a strategic bar and the foresight to bring my laptop gives me an opportunity to seak shelter – physical and spiritual – and go back through my photos into something cooler; the dark and chilled chthonic underworld of Chinese history.

Kingdoms of the Dead

An oddness of China – a country with (by most reckonings) almost four thousand years of mostly continuous imperial history – is the apparent paucity of grand imperial mausolea open to the aspirant tomb raider. Contrasted to the comparable longevity of Pharaonic Egypt – where tour groups can ply a famed sepulchral valley – or even imperial Rome – where, despite a penchant for cremation, the vaults holding the cinerary urns of Augustus or Hadrian still loom over the eternal city – it’s not easy to get into the tombs of China’s most famous dynasts.

The legendary tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shihuang – where, in a set of ancillary pits, the grand Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 – lies untouched, with a combination of pragmatic archaeological concern and more traditional reverence keeping the excavators away. This is replicated elsewhere – Han Wudi, the Emperor whose army marched to Central Asia and beyond, lies in a virgin tumulus; Wu Zetian and her husband Tang Gaozong, rulers at the height of China’s golden age, are entombed beneath an intact mountain; Song tombs buried in Henanese fields.

But against this background, there is actually much more nuance than I originally thought. For those who wish to find it, there are plenty of necropoleis and sepulchres waiting to take you into their chill embrace.

…facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

…the descent to Hades is easy:
The doors of black hell lie open day and night;
But to retrace your steps, and to escape to the airs above,
There’s the challenge, there’s the rub.

(Vergil Aeneid 6.126-129)

Sacrifices and superstition

The earliest of rulers who we might venture to call ‘Chinese’ – with similarities in language, rite and ritual, and art and architecture – are the Shang, a dynasty based in and around present-day Henan in the 2nd millennium BCE. And we have a lot of their tombs – deep shafts dug into the earth, lined with sacrificial offerings.

These offerings, however, go beyond the usual semi-precious metals and triumphs of craftsmanship. For the Shang had a penchant for interring slain animals and horse in the tombs of their rulers; and even grislier, sacrificed slaves and retainers to accompany Kings and Queens to the great beyond. The biggest known complex of these are at Anyany, where the old Shang capital of Yinxu 殷墟 once lay. Elsewhere on China’s central plain, buried pits of petrified chariots and skeletal horses from the Shang and their successors the Zhou have been laid open to the air – a Pompeian preservation afforded by careful excavation in the soft loess soil which entombed then.

It’s China, but not as we know it

While the depth of time and relative lack of grandiosity has left the Shang tombs for us to plumb, elsewhere accidental discoveries of kings existing outside the formal dynastic hierarchy has given us some of China’s best subterranean finds.

Builders on a hill north of Guangzhou’s former walled city in 1983 found stone slabs – mined in quarries to the city’s southwest – entombing the King Zhao Mo 赵眜, who until his death in 124 BCE had ruled an independent ‘Kingdom of the Southern (Nan) Yue’ 南越国 from what is now Guangzhou (his palace has also been found under the city centre). While there’s much we do not know about the Nan Yue – including whether the level of Sinicisation seen in Han-authored contemporary texts is on the mark – they probably spoke a language somewhat like Vietnamese (loan words remain as a relic strata in modern Cantonese), and the Zhao dynasty held themselves as independent and equal to the Han Emperors in Chang’an (Xi’an).

The same is true of some of the burial vaults of ‘barbarian’ kingdoms who occupied most of what we now conceive of as north China after the Han dynasty’s collapse. The desert north of Jiayuguan – the last fort on the Great Wall – is pockmarked by noble tombs of the Northern Wei dynasty, who ruled this area c. 390–530 CE, with delicately painted bricks showing everyday life in their (Mongolic?) Xianbei kingdom.

Vassals and petty princes

Off the beaten track of grand imperial dynasts, some of my favourite tombs are those of lesser branches of imperial families – the princes and princesses serving in royal courts; despatched to govern provincial fiefdoms; or married off to strategic partners.

The most famous of these discoveries was at Mawangdui, a hillside in Changsha which concealed the tomb of Li Cang 利蒼, appointed Marquis of Changsha, his wife Xin Zhui 辛追 (d. 168 BCE) and her perfectly mummified corpse, and some of the best preserved tomb artefacts known from the Han Dynasty.

Further east along the Yangtze watershed, in Yangzhou, the near-contemporary tomb of Han Wudi’s son Liu Xu 刘胥, the ‘Guangling King’ appointed to rule over this (at the time) remote corner of empire, was discovered buried in a hillside, with the wooden palace-like tomb complex now laid bare (having previously been looted) for the curious. While both have been relocated to custom museums for protection, it’s not hard to soak up the ethereality of their excellent presentation.

Another collection lies north of Xi’an, skirting around the tombs of Wu Zetian and Tang Gaozong. While the sumptuous frescoes lining the burial passages into these deep crypts have been removed for specialist preservation (and curation) in the Shaanxi History Museum, the deep shafts and coffin halls have been left in situ.

Tomb raiding goes disastrously wrong

So why haven’t more of the grand imperial mausolea been cracked open and thoroughly explored?

A large part of the answer lies in the fate of the Dingling tomb 明定陵 of Ming Emperor Wanli 明万历, which was sealed in 1620. In 1959, under the newly founded People’s Republic of China, the country’s leadership took the decision to conduct a trial excavation – showing off the new China’s scientific expertise, glorious heritage, and using the first project as a test ahead of more thoroughly excavating the other 13 Ming tombs in the complex north of Beijing.

While initial excavation was a success – a deep shaft draining off water before excavators prised open the marble gates, revealing the untouched treasures and royal sarcophagi – disaster was to come with the follow-up. The delicate metal, wooden, fabric, and silk artefacts had been undisturbed for centuries; now stored improperly in a drafty, poorly built warehouse they rapidly putrified and decayed in Beijing’s harsh climate. Catastrophe dogged catastrophe, culminating in the horror of the Cultural Revolution – Red Guards from Beijing marching to the museum in 1966, removing Wanli’s corpse before hanging it from a tree for class crimes. The destruction of the Dingling tomb’s artefacts was complete; and it was to lead to an indefinite prohibition on future excavation.

This was not even the first serious modern destruction witnessed on the resting places of China’s emperors.

In 1928, during the fractured period known as the ‘warlord era’, local big man Sun Dianying decided to mount a smash and grab on the Qing tombs located in the Hebei countryside north east of Beijing. A column of troops would drive up to and thoroughly plunder the greatest tombs of the recently deposed Manchu dynasty, looting and devastating tombs including those of Empress Cixi – whose body, less than 20 years dead, was manhandled for its jewel-encrusted clothing – and the Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors. The artefacts were carted off for the black market; the bodies discarded.

The lost and forgotten

Most of the above are hardly off the beaten track – many line the pages of Lonely Planet, and the rest are easily signposted by eager taxi drivers or local tourist bureaux. Glorious as they are, therefore, as I go through my albums and diaries, they do not rank in my top tier of necropoleis and sepulchres.

Several months ago I found myself in Dingzhou, a small city in Hebei most famed for its Song pagoda (the tallest in China, and which doubled as a watchtower spying on the encroaching Liao). With time to kill before my train I found a spattering of listed relics – a mosque, a closed off temple – behind a primary school. And behind them all, a small tumulus – with (once I had parted with 5 RMB for the entrance ticket) a tiny, perfectly preserved Han dynasty brick tomb, likely dating to the first century BCE and occupied by a minor Han King.

Breath catching as I emerged from the entrance tunnel, craning to see bricks scrawled on by their architects two millennia prior, the tomb was a paradigm of quiet, tranquility, and isolation, ignorant of the urban sprawl concealing it from above.

And, really, what more could one want?