Rediscovering Henan’s Forgotten Imperial Tombs
An artist’s pilgrimage to the Northern Song imperial tombs
“Where is the head?”
“Kid, if we knew that, don’t you think we’d have put it back on?”
Mr. Li coughs up a ball of phlegm and fumbles with a pack of cigarettes. We sit under the shadow of a looming, gray monolith. It surges upward through the soil, a set of immaculate robes enveloping a towering, slender figure. In its hands rested a tablet. For nine-hundred years, this headless official had diligently stood in line, waiting patiently to deliver his report to the Son of Heaven. Li, the security guard at the site, eventually tells me that the head had fallen victim to the Red Guards during the 1970s; it was turned into gravel.
The headless minister was one of roughly two dozen statues set in this unassuming wheat field. Together, they form a spirit way—an elaborate stony procession common at the entrance of high-end ancient Chinese tombs. These embittered sculptures come together to guard the tomb of Emperor Shenzong of the Song dynasty (960 – 1279), an immense, sprawling mound of earth just to the south of us. Seven Song emperors lie buried here outside Gongyi, a city of 800,000 people in central Henan province, largely undisturbed for 1,000 years.
Li eventually wanders off and leaves me alone. I then snap into gear, remembering why I had come. I pull out my brush and start to paint, eager to catch the last rays of the sun undisturbed. I only had two more days in Gongyi and wanted to make the best of my trip.
The tombs of the Northern Song dynasty (960 – 1127) had been a personal “bucket list” item for years; for a devoted lover of Song history and culture, few other places can be such a worthy location of pilgrimage.
Furthermore, the tombs at Gongyi remain largely unchanged since the time they were built. Most of them exist today in the middle of farmer’s fields or amid jungles of weeds and bushes—their spirit way statues half-concealed underground after a millennium of neglect. Each of these statues was unique—no one the same as another—hence why I wanted to see as many as possible.
In a country which prides itself on meticulously curating and restoring the past, it is rare to find so much as a rooftile out of place in most national heritage sites—yet here in Gongyi thousands litter the ground, being turned up by the farmer’s hoes every year. Of the seven emperors buried here, only two have had the privilege (or perhaps the affront) of having their tombs heavily restored. A local driver from Gongyi, with the surname Zhang, drove me to each of the tombs over three days, which were situated around the outskirts of one small village outside the city. The second tomb I visited was that of the “Martial Emperor,” Taizu, who established the Song state and chose Gongyi for his mausoleum.
During Taizu’s reign, China was unified for the first time in almost a century—a new golden age had begun. Legend has it that Taizu is the only emperor in China’s history to have chosen his burial spot by use of an arrow; fired, by most accounts, from his palace in Kaifeng, and landing here in Gongyi, some 80 miles away.