Eastern Han Cliff Tombs (Sichuan)
Location approximate. The film does not say where this is, so the pin sits on the Hejiang cliff-tomb group in Luzhou — the creator's home prefecture — which is a documented Eastern Han complex of the same kind; the actual group may be elsewhere in Sichuan. What the film shows is a cliff-tomb cemetery cut some 1,800 years ago into the rock of a Sichuan mountainside, the chambers finished not as burial slots but as complete domestic interiors — rooms laid out like a house for the living. That much is ordinary for the tradition : Sichuan's Eastern Han cliff tombs run to thousands of chambers along the Min, Yangtze, Chishui and Xishui valleys, and the best-studied groups at Jiangkou and Mahao carry carved furniture, painted stone coffins and, at Mahao, some of the earliest Buddhist images known in China. The film's own question is narrower and better : where did the spoil go. Cutting chambers of that size out of a cliff produces an enormous volume of broken rock, and there is no talus, no spoil heap, nothing below the cliff face. Somebody carried it away.
Open in the Atlas map →Walkthrough videos (1)
China's eeriest Han cliff tombs: 1,800-year-old homes. Giant stones vanished mysteriously · Luzhou Abo