Tombs of China: The Road, the Room, the Museum and the Empty Mound

01The Road, the Room, the Museum, and the Empty Mound

What do you actually see at a Chinese imperial tomb?

At a Chinese tomb you are almost never looking at the tomb. You are looking at one of four things: the road that leads to it, the room they opened, the museum they built over the pit, or a mound with nobody in it. Ask which of the four before you go, and the day makes sense.

The road is the commonest. An emperor's tomb in China is a hill, natural or heaped, and the hill is sealed. What was built for visitors, then and now, is the approach: a gate, a stone avenue of animals and officials, a hall for offerings, and the mound at the end. The First Emperor 秦始皇's mound near Xi'an 西安 has never been opened; the tomb of the founder of the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century in Nanjing 南京 is a stone avenue that bends around another man's grave; the thirteen Ming emperors north of Beijing share one avenue seven kilometres long; the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century tombs west of Xi'an are mountains with a line of stone figures walking up to them. At all of these the road is the visit.

The room is rare, and it is almost never an emperor's. Since the Ming tomb Dingling 定陵 was dug out in 1956, no emperor's chamber has been opened on purpose, by the survey's account. The rooms you can walk into belong to princes and kings whose tombs were found by accident: by soldiers blasting a hill in 1968 at Mancheng 满城汉墓, by a building crew in downtown Guangzhou 广州 in 1983, by roadworks for the Xi'an airport in 1990, by archaeologists at Xuzhou 徐州 in 1994. The exceptions are the two Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century chambers in the eastern valley, robbed in 1928 and left open, and Dingling itself.

The museum over the pit is the modern Chinese invention. At the Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD emperor Jing 汉景帝's tomb you walk on glass above the pits while the figurines are still being uncovered; at Suizhou 随州 the tomb of a marquis is a rock pit thirteen metres deep kept as it was found, with its sixty-five bells across the province in Wuhan; the terracotta pits themselves are a roof over a hole. And there is a fourth case, the tomb that has been emptied: at Mawangdui 马王堆 in Changsha 长沙 the pits were filled back in, and the lady, her robe and her manuscripts are in the provincial museum 省博物馆 on the other side of town.

The empty mound is the one foreigners least expect. The Yellow Emperor 黄帝's tomb holds a robe, the Yan Emperor 炎帝's and Yu the Great 大禹's are memorials rebuilt in the nineteen-eighties, Genghis Khan 成吉思汗's has no grave at all, only eight hundred years of ritual, and the general Guan Yu 关羽's holds, by tradition, his head. These are visited for ceremony and for trees, and a visitor who arrives expecting an excavation leaves puzzled.

This page sorts forty-one tombs the survey chose into those four kinds, then by who is in them: seventeen emperors, six kings and marquises, five ancestors and sages, six named men and women, cliffs full of coffins in the south, one stepped pyramid in the north-east, and three tombs of the twentieth century.

02The State in Miniature

Why were Chinese emperors buried with armies, officials and foreign envoys?

A Chinese emperor was buried with a copy of his state, because the dead were to be served as the living. The rule has a name, "serve the dead as you served the living 事死如事生," and it explains why some tombs have more to see above ground than a city, and why the modest ones have almost nothing.

The First Emperor 秦始皇 took an army. Eight thousand soldiers by the survey's count, each with a different face, stood in pits east of a mound that the histories say holds rivers of mercury; soil tests around the mound, the survey notes, agree. His successors took the government instead of the army. At the Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD emperor Jing 汉景帝's tomb outside Xi'an 西安 the pits around the mound held the ministries: small pottery officials, servants, animals and stores, the whole household of the state at a third of life size. At the Han emperor Wu 汉武帝's tomb the generals were buried around him, and the stone horse standing on a fallen nomad at the tomb of the young general Huo Qubing 霍去病 is, by the survey's reckoning, the oldest monumental sculpture in China. The Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century emperor Taizong 唐太宗 took two hundred companions, ministers and princes in a ring of tombs around his mountain, and his six horses in relief. His son and daughter-in-law, the only woman to rule China as emperor, took sixty-one foreign envoys in stone, now headless, lined up at the mountain's foot: the empire's foreign relations, in rows.

The Ming 明, 14th to 17th century and Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century made the road itself the statement. The founder of the Ming laid out the pattern at Nanjing 南京 in the fourteenth century, a square walled court for offerings in front and a round mound behind, and every Ming and Qing emperor after him copied it. The Qing emperor Kangxi 康熙, from the dynasty that had replaced the Ming, knelt at that tomb in 1699 and left a stele praising its occupant as greater than the Tang and Song 宋, 10th to 13th century, a political courtesy in stone that is still standing.

There was always a counter-tradition, and it is worth knowing before you drive out to see it. The Han emperor Wen 汉文帝 ordered a plain burial, pottery and no gold, and got one; his real tomb was only identified in 2021, seven hundred years after the wrong hill had been named. Cao Cao 曹操, the warlord of the Three Kingdoms, ordered no mound, no trees and no treasure, and his tomb was found in 2009 under a field near Anyang 安阳 with stone tablets naming him. The Qing ancestors' tomb in the north-east has no stone animals, no terrace and no side halls, on the principle that the founders lived plainly and their descendants should not show off in front of them. A modest burial leaves a museum and a story, and little else. If you want the road with the animals, choose an emperor who wanted one.

03Xi’an: The First Emperor and the Han

Which tombs should you see in Xi'an besides the terracotta army?

Xi'an 西安 has four imperial tombs within an hour, and they answer the same question four ways: what does a Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD or Qin 秦, 3rd century BC emperor leave above ground?

The terracotta army 兵马俑 is the first anchor of any China trip, and it needs a reservation. The pits are forty kilometres east of the city, half an hour by high-speed train or an hour by road, and the survey counts three to four hours as the visit. Everything you see is a pit under a roof: the largest with its ranks facing east, a smaller one with the command group, and the bronze chariots in a side hall. The mound itself, a kilometre and a half to the west, is a wooded hill with a path around it and nothing to enter; the histories describe rivers of mercury inside, and that is one reason it has stayed shut. Book the ticket days ahead with your passport; the site turns away visitors without one.

The emperor Jing 汉景帝's tomb is the alternative the survey prefers, and almost nobody goes. Twenty kilometres north of the city, found in 1990 when the airport expressway was cut through, it is the best site museum 遗址博物馆 in the country by the survey's judgement: you walk on glass floors above the pits, and below your feet are the pottery officials and animals of a Han court, a third of life size, some still half in the earth. Two hours, no reservation, and a fraction of the crowd. Seen after the army it reads as the next chapter, the state after the war.

The emperor Wu 汉武帝's tomb is a mound in the fields and a general's grave. Forty-five kilometres west, the largest Han mound was built over fifty-three years by the emperor who sent Zhang Qian 张骞 west and opened the road to Central Asia. The visit is the stone carvings at the tomb of his general Huo Qubing 霍去病 beside it, the horse standing on the fallen nomad among them, and the small museum. An hour and a half, no reservation.

The emperor Wen 汉文帝's tomb is for people who like archaeology in progress. For seven hundred years the wrong hill on the White Deer Plateau 白鹿原 carried his name; in 2021 the state heritage authority confirmed the real tomb at Jiangcun 江村大墓, a few kilometres away, a plain burial of pottery as his decree had ordered. There is no regular ticket yet, by the survey, and little to see beyond the shape of the land, which is the point.

The day that works is the army in the morning with the reservation, Jing's tomb in the afternoon, or the reverse when the army's afternoon slots are the only ones left; Wu's tomb is a separate half day to the west, best joined to the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century mountains in the next section. All four sit on the plateau north and east of the Wei River 渭河, and a car from Xi'an is the honest way to link more than two.

04The Tang Mountains

Which Tang dynasty tombs near Xi'an are worth visiting?

The Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century emperors stopped heaping earth and took mountains instead. Their tombs are a line of peaks north-west of Xi'an 西安 with stone figures walking up to each, and three of them are worth a day in a car.

The Tang Zhaoling 唐昭陵 near Xi'an began it. The emperor Taizong 唐太宗, founder of the Tang golden age, had a chamber cut into Mount Jiuzong 九嵕山 in the seventh century and forbade a mound; the tomb precinct is, by the survey's measure, the largest in China by area, with two hundred companion tombs of his ministers and family. The famous six horses carved in relief for it are not on the mountain: four are in the stone museum in Xi'an and two were sold abroad a century ago and stand in Philadelphia. Seventy kilometres from the city, an hour and a half on site, no reservation, and a museum of the companions' finds at the foot.

Qianling 黔灵山 is the one most visitors choose, and the reason is a blank stone. The emperor Gaozong 唐高宗 and Wu Zetian 武则天, his empress and later emperor in her own name, lie together under Mount Liang 梁山, eighty kilometres from Xi'an. The avenue climbs between winged horses, ostriches, officials and lions to two steles, one carved with Gaozong's virtues and one left blank, which tradition reads as Wu Zetian leaving her reputation to history. Beside them stand sixty-one statues of foreign envoys who attended the funeral, all without heads. The mountain has never been robbed, by the survey's account, so what is inside is anyone's guess; the tombs of a prince and a princess beside it are the ones you can walk into. Two to three hours, no reservation.

Qiaoling 桥陵 is the one the survey would send you to if you could only see one, and it is empty of people. The emperor Ruizong 唐睿宗's mountain at Pucheng 蒲城, a hundred and ten kilometres from Xi'an, has the largest and finest stone figures of any Tang tomb by the survey's judgement: officials four metres tall, lions nearly three, forty-seven figures along an avenue of six hundred metres, and a lion at the east gate 东门 that turns its head to look back, found nowhere else. You will very likely walk it alone.

Twenty kilometres away, Tailing 泰陵 shows what a rebellion does to a tomb. The emperor Xuanzong 唐玄宗 chose the site himself in 729 at the height of his reign; he was buried in 763, after the An Lushan 安禄山 rebellion had broken the dynasty, with figures half the size of his father's at Qiaoling and a single companion grave, the eunuch Gao Lishi 高力士 who had stayed loyal. The ticket is the price of a bus fare. Seeing the father's tomb and the son's in one afternoon is the clearest lesson in Tang history the survey knows.

05The Ming and Qing Valleys

Which Ming and Qing imperial tombs can you enter, and which valley should you choose?

The last two dynasties buried their emperors in valleys, in the pattern the founder of the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century set at Nanjing 南京: a square court for offerings in front, a round mound behind, and one stone avenue shared by everyone who came after. Five sites hold them, and one of the five is the only place in China where you can enter an emperor's chamber.

Nanjing has the original, Ming Xiaoling 明孝陵. Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋, the peasant who founded the Ming, was buried under Purple Mountain 紫金山 in 1398, and his avenue of stone animals, twelve pairs of lions, camels, elephants and the rest, bends around a smaller hill because, the story goes, he refused to move the tomb of a king of the Three Kingdoms and kept him as a gatekeeper. It is the only imperial avenue in China that is not straight. The mound has never been opened; the visit is the avenue, best in late autumn when the ginkgo leaves come down, and it is ten minutes' walk from a metro station.

Beijing has the thirteen. In a valley fifty kilometres north of the city the Ming emperors from Yongle 永乐 onward share one avenue of seven kilometres. Three tombs are open: Changling 长陵 with what the survey calls the largest hall of nanmu 楠木 timber in China, Zhaoling, and Dingling 定陵, the tomb of the Wanli 万历 emperor, dug out in 1956 and the only Ming chamber you can descend into. Three to five hours, and the survey advises booking.

East of Beijing, the Qing valley is the richer and the sadder. At the Eastern Qing Tombs 清东陵, a hundred and twenty-five kilometres from the city, lie five emperors and fifteen empresses, including Qianlong 乾隆 and the empress dowager Cixi 慈禧. Both their chambers are open, because in 1928 a warlord's troops blew them open and emptied them; what was left is a chamber carved from floor to ceiling with Buddhist figures and scripture, and Cixi's hall clad in gold leaf and dark hardwood. Four to five hours; go by car.

West of Beijing, the other valley is the quiet one. The Western Qing Tombs 清西陵, a hundred and twenty kilometres out, hold four emperors under a forest of old pines, from Yongzheng 雍正, who started the second valley rather than lie near his father, to Guangxu 光绪, whose tomb of 1915 was the last imperial tomb built in China and was robbed in 1938. The dynasty's rule that sons alternate valleys was broken by Daoguang 道光, who moved west on the grounds that his eastern site leaked, and the survey tells that story on site. No reservation, a fraction of the eastern valley's crowd.

And in Hubei 湖北 there is a tomb for a man who was never emperor. At Zhongxiang 钟祥 the Jiajing 嘉靖 emperor spent three years fighting his own court to have his dead father declared emperor, then built him the only Ming tomb with two mounds; it was the first of all these tombs to be inscribed as world heritage, in 2000. Two hours, and you will have it to yourself.

06The Hidden Emperors

Which Chinese imperial tombs do foreign visitors never hear about?

Three sets of imperial tombs sit outside every foreign itinerary, and each shows a dynasty the guidebooks skip: the Manchus before they took Beijing, the Song 宋, 10th to 13th century emperors in a wheat field, and a kingdom that Genghis Khan 成吉思汗 wiped off the map.

Shenyang 沈阳 keeps the Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century before the Qing. Three tombs in and around the city, inscribed together in 2004, run down the generations and up in size. The smallest and most senior is at Xinbin 新宾, a hundred and seventy kilometres out: four ancestors of the dynasty's founder under horse-hoof mounds behind a wooden palisade gate, with no stone animals, no terrace and no side halls, because ancestors are to be honoured plainly. Nurhaci 努尔哈赤, the founder, lies on a hillside in the east of the city up a stair of a hundred and eight steps, ten minutes from a metro station. His son Huang Taiji 皇太极, who renamed the dynasty Qing, has the largest of the three, a walled tomb with corner towers like a small fortress, set in a city park of two thousand old pines three minutes from the metro. The three together are a morning and an afternoon, and the survey rates the founder's as the calmer of the two in town.

Gongyi 巩义 has the Northern Song in the fields. Between Zhengzhou 郑州 and Luoyang 洛阳, seven emperors of the Song lie under square earth platforms among wheat and corn, their halls long gone since the Jin invasion and the Yuan 元, 13th to 14th century, but nearly a thousand stone figures by the survey's count still standing in the crops, the largest body of Song sculpture anywhere. One tomb is a restored city park; the rest are farmland, free, and need a car and three to five hours. Two of the dynasty's most loved ministers, the judge Bao Zheng 包拯 and the chancellor Kou Zhun 寇准, are buried alongside.

Yinchuan 银川 has the pyramids of a lost empire. Along the foot of the Helan Mountains 贺兰山, thirty kilometres from the city, nine emperors of the Tangut state of Western Xia 西夏 lie under octagonal mounds shaped like Buddhist towers, the largest of them, by the survey, the tomb of the founder Li Yuanhao 李元昊. The kingdom was destroyed in 1227 by the Mongols, Genghis Khan died in the campaign, and its script, which looks like Chinese and reads as nothing, was dead for seven centuries. The tombs were inscribed as world heritage in July 2025 by the survey's record, and the desert light on the mounds in the late afternoon is the reason photographers go. Two to three hours, no reservation.

What the three share is that nothing is opened and the road is short: you are looking at mounds, the shape of a state that is gone, and in Shenyang at the moment before a small northern people took the largest empire in the world.

07The Princes’ Hoards

Which Han dynasty tombs in China can you walk into?

The rooms you can actually walk into belong to kings and marquises, and they were found by accident. Six of them hold, between them, most of what the world knows about how a Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD noble expected to live after death.

Mancheng 满城汉墓, near Baoding 保定, was blown open by soldiers in 1968. Two chambers cut into a rock hill held a prince of the Han and his wife, each in a suit of jade plates sewn with gold wire, the first complete ones ever found, two and a half thousand plates in his by the survey's count, and a bronze lamp shaped as a kneeling maid whose sleeve draws the smoke into her body. You walk through the rock rooms; the suits and the lamp are in the provincial museum 省博物馆 at Shijiazhuang 石家庄. An hour and a half, twenty kilometres from Baoding.

Xuzhou 徐州 lets you walk a hundred and seventeen metres into a hill. The tomb of a king of Chu on Lion Mountain 狮子山, dug in the nineteen-nineties, is a cave palace with side chambers still sealed, a jade suit of more than four thousand plates by the survey's count, and its own small terracotta army 兵马俑 nearby. One ticket covers the hill, the figures and the stone-relief gallery; eight kilometres from the high-speed station.

Guangzhou 广州 has a king under a building site. In 1983 a construction crew on a hill in the city centre broke into the tomb of the second king of Nanyue 南越, a southern kingdom of the second century BC. The tomb is kept where it was, with a museum on top, and the finds include the oldest imperial seal in China by the survey's reckoning and a Persian silver box that proves the sea road to the west was open two thousand years ago. The ticket costs less than a coffee and the metro stops outside.

Nanchang 南昌 has the richest Han tomb ever opened. Liu He 刘贺 was emperor for twenty-seven days in 74 BC before his ministers deposed him, and died a marquis by Poyang Lake 鄱阳湖. His tomb, excavated from 2011, gave up three hundred and seventy-eight gold pieces, two million coins, the earliest known portrait of Confucius 孔子 on a bronze mirror, and a lost chapter of the Analects, all by the survey's count. The site park 遗址公园 opened in 2020, forty kilometres from the city, and requires a reservation through its official account 公众号.

Suizhou 随州 keeps a bell pit as it was found. The marquis Yi of Zeng 曾侯乙, a small state nobody had heard of until 1978, was buried in a rock pit thirteen metres deep with sixty-five bronze bells that still play a full twelve-tone scale. The pit is under a hall two kilometres from the town; the bells are in the provincial museum in Wuhan 武汉, forty minutes away by high-speed train.

And Changsha 长沙 keeps the lady. At Mawangdui 马王堆 the wife of a Han chancellor was found in 1972 so well preserved that her skin was still soft, with a silk robe weighing forty-nine grams and the oldest surviving copy of the Daodejing 道德经. The pits were filled back in; she and everything from the tomb are in the provincial museum, free with a real-name reservation, and the visit is a museum visit with the tomb as its story.

08The Tombs With No Body

Is there a body in the Yellow Emperor's tomb or Genghis Khan's mausoleum?

Six of the most visited tombs in China hold no one, or no one certain. They are visited for ceremony, for old trees and for a name, and a visitor who knows that in advance enjoys them; one who expects an excavation does not.

The Yellow Emperor 黄帝's tomb holds a robe. On Mount Qiao 桥山 in northern Shaanxi 陕西, a hundred and seventy kilometres from Xi'an 西安 and an hour by high-speed train, the legendary ancestor of the Chinese has a mound that tradition calls a burial of clothes, ringed by eighty thousand old cypresses by the survey's count, one of them said to be planted by the emperor himself. The state holds its rite here each spring at Qingming 清明, and in 1937 the two sides of the civil war held one together. Two and a half hours; book ahead in April.

The Yan Emperor 炎帝's and Yu the Great 大禹's are the southern pair. At Yanling 炎陵 in Hunan 湖南 the legendary father of farming and medicine has had a temple since 967, and the halls you see were rebuilt in the late nineteen-eighties; the stele gallery with fifty-three Ming 明, 14th to 17th century and Qing imperial offerings is the old part. At Shaoxing 绍兴 the flood-tamer Yu has a mound at the foot of Mount Kuaiji 会稽山, a burial stone with an inscription from the second century that Lu Xun 鲁迅 studied, a four-metre stele of 1540, and halls rebuilt from 1986. Both are honest about their layers if you read the dates.

Genghis Khan 成吉思汗's tomb has no grave at all. The Mongols buried their khans in secret, and no tomb has been found. What stands at Ejin Horo 伊金霍洛, forty kilometres from Ordos 鄂尔多斯, is a set of three yurt-shaped halls built in the nineteen-fifties around eight white tents that have travelled with the khan's relics for eight centuries, guarded by one clan of hereditary keepers who still hold a rite every day. It is a place of ceremony, and one of the few in China where the ceremony is the thing to see.

Wang Zhaojun 王昭君's mound is a poem. The palace woman sent in 33 BC to marry a nomad chief, credited with forty years of peace on the frontier, has a thirty-three-metre mound outside Hohhot 呼和浩特 called the Green Grave 青冢, because its grass was said to stay green when the plain turned yellow. Scholars doubt it is hers; poets since the Tang have not cared. Free, with a museum, closed on Tuesdays.

Guan Yu 关羽's tomb at Luoyang 洛阳 holds his head. The general of the Three Kingdoms, deified over eighteen centuries into the warrior counterpart of Confucius, was beheaded in 220 and his head sent to Cao Cao 曹操, who buried it with honours. The temple over it dates from 1592 and carries the title of a grove, otherwise reserved for the cemetery of Confucius 孔林. Seven kilometres from the city, an hour.

How to visit them: go for the trees, the steles and the rite, read every date on the building you are looking at, and do not ask where the body is.

09The Named Dead

Where are Confucius, Zhang Qian, Yue Fei and Cao Cao buried?

Four tombs of named people carry more history than most palaces, because the name is the point: a sage's family, a diplomat, a wronged general, and a warlord found in 2009.

The cemetery of Confucius 孔林 at Qufu 曲阜 is the oldest family graveyard in use anywhere, by the survey's account. Confucius was buried here in 479 BC and seventy-eight generations of his descendants have followed, a hundred thousand graves under the cypresses by the survey's count. The master's own mound is plain. In front of it stands the withered trunk of a tree said to be planted by the disciple Zigong 子贡, who kept vigil beside the grave for six years, and the avenue of arches and steles that the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century and Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century added as the state took the family's cemetery into its own ritual. A single ticket costs almost nothing; the three Confucius sites together take a day.

Zhang Qian 张骞's tomb is the one grave on the Silk Road's world heritage list. The envoy who went west for the Han in 138 BC, was held by the nomads for ten years and came home with the map that opened the road, lies at Chenggu 城固 in the Hanzhong 汉中 valley under a Han mound with two stone tigers. A dig in 1938 found a clay seal impression with his title, which settled whose tomb it was. Free since the summer of 2026 by the survey's record, closed on Mondays, a short ride from the high-speed station.

Yue Fei 岳飞's tomb at Hangzhou 杭州 is the most morally loaded ground in China. The general who fought the Jurchen was executed on fabricated charges in 1142, buried in secret by a prison guard, and given a proper tomb by the next emperor twenty-one years later. Since the sixteenth century four iron figures of the men and the woman who condemned him have knelt in front of his grave with their hands bound behind them, and visitors have spat on them for five hundred years, which the signs now ask you not to do. Beside the West Lake 西湖, an hour, a small ticket.

Cao Cao 曹操's tomb ended a legend. For a thousand years the story ran that the warlord had built seventy-two false tombs to hide the real one. In 2009 a dig at Anyang 安阳 turned up a tomb with stone tablets reading "used by the King of Wei," and his own decree of a plain burial, no mound and no trees, explained why nobody had found it. A museum opened over it in 2023, twenty-five kilometres from the city, and the dig itself, the survey notes, was the largest public argument in the history of Chinese archaeology.

What they share is that the grave is small and the visit is the story: read it before you go, and the mound, the tree or the kneeling statues become the whole of Chinese history in an hour.

10Cliffs and Coffins

Where are the hanging coffins in China, and can you see them?

In the south of China the dead were put into cliffs, and in the north-east one king was put under a pyramid. Four sites make a chapter that no other country has.

Leshan 乐山 has a cliff full of Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD tombs beside the Giant Buddha 乐山大佛. In the red sandstone of the same hill, five hundred and forty-four chambers by the survey's count were cut in the first and second centuries as houses for the dead, with doors, beams and furniture carved from the rock. On the lintel of the first tomb sits a small seated Buddha that the survey calls the earliest known in China, two centuries before the Dunhuang 敦煌 caves, and a relief of the assassin Jing Ke 荆轲 lunging at the King of Qin 秦, 3rd century BC. The tombs are inside the Buddha ticket, five hundred metres from the south gate, and most visitors walk past them.

Gongxian 珙县 has the hanging coffins of a people who no longer exist. Above a valley sixty kilometres from the county town, two hundred and ninety-five coffins by the survey's count rest on wooden stakes and ledges between twenty-six and a hundred metres up the cliff, each hollowed from a single log. They belonged to the Bo 僰人, a people of the south-west who were destroyed by a Ming 明, 14th to 17th century army in 1573 and left nothing else but these and their red paintings on the rock. How the coffins were raised is still not settled; the survey lists four theories. Two to three hours, with the small museum and the walk under the cliff.

Longhu Mountain 龙虎山 has the oldest ones, and a show. In the sandstone cliffs above the Luxi River 泸溪河 in Jiangxi 江西, two hundred and five tombs dated to around 600 BC by the survey belonged to the Yue, boat-builders who tattooed their bodies, and yielded the earliest known thirteen-string zither in China. In 1989 a Chinese and American team worked out one way the coffins could have been hoisted, and the park has re-enacted it every day since, from bamboo rafts on the river, cancelled in rain. The cliffs are part of a world natural heritage site; the coffins are the reason to take the raft.

Ji'an 集安 has the General's Tomb 将军坟. At the old capital of the Goguryeo 高句丽 kingdom on the Yalu 鸭绿江, a stepped pyramid of eleven hundred cut granite blocks by the survey's count, thirteen metres high and thirty-one to a side, built around 414 for the king who moved the capital to Pyongyang 平壤. Ten-tonne stones lean against its sides to hold them. Nearby stands the stele of his father, eighteen hundred characters of the kingdom's founding story, and the two are inscribed together with the walled city and the mountain fortress. One combined ticket, an hour from the town, and the border with North Korea 朝鲜 across the river.

None of these can be entered, which makes them the purest case of the road: you look up, or across the water, and the coffins and the pyramid look back.

11The Modern Dead

How do you visit Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum, and what else did the republic build?

The twentieth century buried three men who could not be buried like emperors, and the three tombs show China trying out how a republic mourns.

Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum 中山陵 on Purple Mountain 紫金山 is the one every visitor to Nanjing 南京 climbs. The founder of the republic died in 1925, and a thirty-six-year-old architect, Lü Yanzhi 吕彦直, won the competition with a plan in the shape of a bell, a wake-up call for the nation; he died before it was finished. From the gate to the hall are three hundred and ninety-two steps, one for each million Chinese in 1929 by the survey's telling, laid so that from the bottom you see only steps and from the top only landings. The hall holds a seated marble figure; the chamber behind it, with the coffin below floor level, is seen from a rail. It is free with a real-name reservation, and it stands a kilometre and a half from the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century founder's tomb on the same hillside, so that a morning walk takes you from the first Ming emperor to the first president, a fourteenth-century avenue to a twentieth-century stair.

Yuan Shikai 袁世凯's tomb at Anyang 安阳 is the odd one out, and worth the detour if you are there for the oracle bones 甲骨. The first president of the republic made himself emperor for eighty-three days in 1916, died in disgrace, and was buried by his government in a tomb finished in 1918 that could not decide what it was: a Ming-style stone avenue whose officials wear republican military uniform, a mound ringed by columns in the Roman manner, and iron gates from Germany. Three kilometres from the station, an hour, and the survey's note that it survived the nineteen-fifties by being kept as a negative example.

Lu Xun 鲁迅's tomb in Shanghai is a park bench away from the writer. The author of the first modern story in Chinese, who died in 1936 and was carried to his grave by ten thousand people under a banner reading "soul of the nation 民族魂," was moved in 1956 to the park in the district where he had lived, under a stone lettered by Mao Zedong and a bronze figure of the writer in a rattan chair with a cigarette. The park is free and open; the museum beside it needs a reservation and closes on Mondays.

Read the three together and the century falls into place: a hero given a mountain, a failed emperor given a hybrid, and a writer given a public park, which is where Chinese cities now put the people they honour.

12PreeChina, and What It Is Not

What does PreeChina arrange at China's tombs?

• The hard parts of a tomb day are the reservation, the car and the order. Those are what we do; the rest is a hill and a road.
• A Xi'an 西安 tomb day. The terracotta army 兵马俑 booked with your passport days ahead, and the emperor Jing 汉景帝's glass floors the same afternoon, with a driver between them; or the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century mountains as a second day, Qianling 黔灵山 and Qiaoling 桥陵 by car with lunch at Pucheng 蒲城, and Tailing 泰陵 if you want the before-and-after.
• A Nanjing 南京 morning. The Ming 明, 14th to 17th century founder's avenue at opening time, in November if you can choose, then the walk along the hillside to Sun Yat-sen 孙中山's steps, with the reservation made for you; the whole thing by metro and on foot.
• A Beijing valley. The thirteen Ming tombs with Dingling 定陵's chamber for a first visit, or the Western Qing Tombs 清西陵 for a second, when the pines and the empty avenues are what you want; the Eastern Qing Tombs 清东陵 when the story of 1928 and the carved chamber are the draw. All three are a day with a car.
• The accidental kings. Reservations for the marquis of Haihun outside Nanchang 南昌 and for the lady of Mawangdui 马王堆's museum in Changsha 长沙, both of which turn away walk-ins; the Nanyue 南越 king in Guangzhou 广州 and the Chu king at Xuzhou 徐州 need nothing but a metro or a taxi.
• Shenyang 沈阳 by metro. Both tombs in the city are a stop away from the line, and we fit them into a day that ends with the palace.
• What this page is not. It is not the museums page, which has the things taken out of these tombs, from the jade suits to the bells to the lady's robe, and which is where several of the tombs on this page are best seen. It is not the parks page, which has Purple Mountain 紫金山, the Confucius 孔子 sites and Longhu Mountain 龙虎山 as places to spend a day. It is not the grottoes page, though the small Buddha at Leshan 乐山大佛 points there. It is not a page about the rites held at the ancestors' tombs: we describe them and arrange a visit, and we do not take a view on them. And it does not deal in the emperors' unopened chambers, which stay shut, and should.
• One practical note that runs through the page. Four of these sites, by the survey, admit nobody without a real-name reservation: the terracotta army, the marquis of Haihun, Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum 中山陵 and the Hunan 湖南 museum. We check the rule for each site the week you go, because it changes.