THE PYRAMIDS OF CHINA

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DUNHUANG CAVES: ART - MANUSCRIPTS

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The Thirteen Tombs of the Ming Dynasty
World's Largest Concentration of Royal Tombs

At a distance of 50 km northwest of Beijing stands an arc-shaped cluster of hills fronted by a small plain. Here is where 13 emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) were buried, and the area is known as the Ming Tombs.

Construction of the tombs started in 1409 and ended with the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644. In over 200 years tombs were built over an area of 40 square kilometres, which is surrounded by walls totalling 40 kilometres. Each tomb is located at the foot of a separate hill and is linked with the other tombs by a road called the Sacred Way. The stone archway at the southern end of the Sacred Way, built in 1540, is 14 metres high and 19 metres wide, and is decorated with designs of clouds, waves and divine animals.

Beijing served as the national capital during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. Unlike Ming and Qing rulers who all built massive tombs for themselves, Yuan rulers left no similar burial grounds.

Beijing nomads came from the Mongolian steppe. Mongols who established the Yuan Dynasty held the belief that they had come from: earth. they adopted a simple funeral method: the dead was placed inside a hollowed nanmu tree, which was then buried under grassland. Growth of grass soon left no traces of the tombs.

During the Ming Dynasty established by Han Chinese coming from an agricultural society in central China, people believed the existence of an after-world, where the dead "lived" a life similar to that of the living. Ming emperor, therefore, has grand mausoleums built for themselves. Qing rulers did likewise.

The stone archway at the southern end of the Sacred Way, built in 1540, is 14 metres high and 19 metres wide, and is decorated with designs of clouds, waves and divine animals. Well-proportioned and finely carved, the archway is one of the best preserved specimens of its kind in the Ming Dynasty. It is also the largest ancient stone archway in China.

The Stele Pavilion, not far from the Great Palace Gate, is actually a pavilion with a double-eaved roof. On the back of the stele is carved poetry written by Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty when he visited the Ming Tombs.

The Sacred Way inside the gate of the Ming Tomb is lined with 18 pairs of stone human figures and animals. These include four each of three types of officials: civil, military and meritorious officials, symbolizing those who assist the emperor in the administration of the state, plus four each of six types of animals: lion, griffin, camel, elephant, unicorn and horse.

Yongling Tomb, built in 1536, is the tomb for Emperor Shizong, Zhu Houcong (1507-1566). He ruled for 45 years.

The Dingling Tomb is the tomb of Emperor Wanli (reigned 1573-1619), the 13th emperor of the Ming Dynasty, whose personal name was Zhu Yijun, and of his two empresses, Xiao Duan and Xiao Jing. The tomb was completed in six years (1584-1590), it occupies a total area of 1,195 square meters at the foot of Dayu Mountain southwest of the Changling Tomb.

The underground palace at Dingling Tomb consists of an antechamber, a central chamber and a rear chamber plus the left and right annexes. One of the pictures shows the central chamber where the sacrificial utensils are on display. Two marble doors are made of single slabs and carved with life-size human figures, flowers and birds. More than 3,000 articles have been unearthed from the tumulus, the most precious being the golden crowns of the emperor and his queen.

Changling is the tomb of emperor Yongle (reigned 1403-1424), the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty whose personal name was Zhu Di, and of his empress. Built in 1413, the mausoleum extends over an area of 100,000 square metres. The soul tower, which tells people whose tomb it is, rests on a circular wall called the "city of treasures" which surrounds the burial mound. The "city of treasures" at Changling has a length of more than a kilometre.

September 22, 1999 - Reuters - London

Archaeologists have found the world's oldest playable flute in China.

The 9,000 year-old, 8.6 inch instrument in pristine condition has seven holes and was made from a hollow bone of a bird, the red-crowned crane.

It is one of six flutes and 30 fragments recovered from the Jiahu archaeological site in Henan province.

``They are the oldest playable musical instruments,'' Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, said in a telephone interview.

A fragment of a 45,000 year-old flute was previously found in Slovenia but it could not be played.

A short rendition of a Chinese folk song called the Chinese Small Cabbage.

``It sounds like a modern flute. It has a thin tone. It's very attractive,'' a nuclear scientist, who assisted researchers from the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Henan on the project, said.

``As the editor of Nature said, 'It gives you an eerie feeling to hear it played on an instrument that old','' he added.

The researchers believe the site will turn out to be one of the most important Neolithic sites ever found. In addition to proving that the early Chinese were accomplished musicians and craftspeople the Jiahu site also reveals much about their culture.

``It appears that the culture was more advanced than we were giving them credit for.''

``During this period 9,000 years ago, the Chinese in this village Jiahu already had established a village life. They had parts of the city, or village that were devoted to different functions,'' said Harbottle.

Some of the other flutes, which have between five and eight holes, could also be played but produced a cracking sound that alarmed researchers who feared the instruments could be damaged.

The scientists plan to make replicas of the ancient instruments to study their tonal qualities without endangering the instruments.

ABC News - April 1999

"His face is at rest, eyes closed and sunken, lips slightly parted; his hands lie in his lap, while his knees and head are tilted up - like a man who has just drifted off to sleep in his hammock. Visitors tend to tiptoe and lower their voices. Mummies found around Urumchi knock the idea that ancient China was free of any Western influence.

"A two-inch beard covers his face. Here and there white hairs glint among the yellow-brown, betraying his age - somewhere past 50. He would have been an imposing figure in life, for he once stood six feet six inches tall." So writes Elizabeth Barber of the one known as Cherchen Man.

Clad in finely woven woolens, he almost looks as if he could rise out of bed and begin another day in what must have been a difficult life.

Cherchen Man has been dead for about 3,000 years. Though his lips no longer move, he speaks volumes about the first settlers in a bleak desert along China's fabled Silk Road. Until a few years ago, he was the last man scholars would have expected to find there.

Uncovering an Unexpected Past

Cherchen Man, along with dozens of other perfectly preserved mummies found in Turkestan, in western China, has stood archaeology on its ears.

Although the mummies have been known to exist for decades, no one paid them much attention until 1987 when Victor Mair, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania, came across them while leading a group of tourists through an obscure museum in the town of Urumchi (also spelled Ürümqi).

Mair was stunned, and not just because their clothing was perfectly preserved. The mummies, he believed, were Caucasian, with high-bridged noses, deep, round eye sockets, and fair hair.

How had they come to be there, so long before any Westerners were thought to have crossed the Ural Mountains into Asia? The implications are profound, suggesting that Westerners may have influenced Chinese culture, which had been thought to arise independently of the West.

Cherchen Man was found in a tomb with three women and a baby. How had they died? Why did they settle in a desert so severe that many have died traveling from one oasis to the next? Were they really from the West?

Unraveling Threads

Mair assembled a team of experts to see what the mummies could tell us. Among them was Elizabeth Barber, professor of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

For Barber, author of a recently released book, The Mummies of Urumchi, it was an opportunity she had been preparing for ever since she learned to weave at her mother's knee. Barber and Irene Good, another team member, are among the world's leading experts on prehistoric textiles.

The stacks of clothing buried with the mummies were unlike anything seen before. "It just blew me away," Barber says.

For 13 years, Barber had rummaged through Europe from England to Iran, examining the oldest textiles she could find. Outside of Egypt, that consisted of just thumbnail-size fragments.

Even those tiny samples yielded clues about the laborious chore of creating clothing. She learned what kinds of looms they used to weave which patterns, and what raw materials they used.

So when she arrived in Urumqi, she came with a wealth of understanding, but nothing had prepared her for what she saw. "It was like handling 19th century fabric," she says. The mummies had been buried in a salt basin, and the salt kept the material dry.

Clothing Was Non-Native Wool

"The first thing that struck me was that it was all sheep's wool, and that really surprised me. I had expected most of it to be plant fiber," she says.

Sheep aren't indigenous to that part of the world, so those early travelers must have brought sheep with them from the west. The fabric patterns must have been woven on looms similar to those used to create the scraps she found in eastern Europe.

That, along with other clues - grains of wheat were found in some tombs, and wheat is not indigenous to the region - was clear evidence that Cherchen Man was a product of Europe. So, too, were less well-preserved mummies of others found throughout the area, some of whom had died 1,000 years earlier.

Why had they gone to that area, which even today is so desolate that few live there? How had they died?

A Late Addition to a Sealed Tomb

Unlike other tombs in the area, Cherchen Man's final resting place was not designed to be reopened, Barber says. He was buried with the three women, one of whom is presumed to be his wife, and the tomb was sealed.

A few weeks later, the baby's body, also well preserved, was placed above the main burial chamber. The baby, about 3 months old, was wrapped in a bright red shroud. Alongside was a sheep udder fashioned into a nursing bottle.

"It is clear that they (other members of the community) tried to keep the baby alive after the mother and father had died," Barber says, so this wasn't a case of killing the entire family so all could accompany the man into the next life.

None of the mummies show any sign of violence. They apparently died, Barber surmises, from an epidemic. Still unknown, however, is why they were there in the first place.

Civilization in Cherchen Man's Day

"When the earliest of these Central Asian corpses, nestled into the sands of Tarim Basin, about 2000 B.C. or a little after, the pyramids of Egypt had already stood for half a millennium, but the best-known pharaohs, Ramesses II and King Tut were rather more than five hundred years into the future.

"Next door in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians - first inventors of the art of writing - were already dying out and Hammurabi was soon to set up his famous law code; the Greeks and Romans had not yet even arrived in Greece and Italy from the northeast. On the other hand, 'Ice Man,' the Late Stone Age body found in 1991 by hikers in the Alps, had died well over a thousand years before."

"Europe and the Near East were living in the Bronze Age, a period characterized by the use of soft metals. To the east the Chinese had not yet learned to use metal but were already busy domesticating the precious silkworm that would one day lend its name to the famous caravan route of Inner Asia, the Silk Road, along whose stretches the mummies have been found."

- From The Mummies of Urumchi by Elizabeth Barber