Addendum | Are Imperial Tombs Really Just for Burying Emperors?

(This piece is a compilation of amateur archaeological notes. It represents no academic institution and is offered for reference only.)

The version we were all taught as children is simple: an imperial tomb is for burying an emperor. The grave goods, the tomb passages, the traps, all of it exists so that a dead emperor can go on enjoying underground the pomp he had above. The ancients put it in four characters: serve the dead as you served the living.

Broadly, that is right. But this version leaves out something more basic: most imperial tombs were not built after the death. A tomb an emperor raised for himself while still alive had its own name in the old books, the longevity tomb. Work usually began in the year he took the throne and went on until he stopped breathing. The First Emperor of Qin came to the throne at thirteen and started cutting into Mount Li that same year; the work ran 38 years, and the histories put the labor force at 700,000 men.

How much of a state such a project ate, the ancients worked out for themselves. The Book of Jin quotes a Han saying:

The Han divided the tribute and taxes of all under heaven into three: one part for the ancestral temples, one part for guests of state, one part for the mountain tomb.

A dynasty putting 1/3 of its annual revenue, year after year, into an underground building that no one was lying in yet.

Following that same version, there is a misunderstanding that travels even wider: that grave goods were for the dead to use. The wares fired for burial alone have a trade name, mingqi, the spirit goods. Loose-bodied and thin-walled, they hold no liquid and will not take a fire. They were made with no intention that anyone use them. The real readers of that inventory were up above: how many ritual cauldrons, how many tomb passages, the numbers were all fixed, and when they failed to add up the living had something to say about it at once.

The passages are part of a man's rank as well. A Han imperial tomb had 4 approach passages underground, one to each direction; a feudal lord was allowed 2, and below that only 1. For judging whether a tomb is imperial-grade, that test is harder than the grave goods.

The forms kept shifting. Pre-Qin practice was neither mound nor tree: walk across the ground and nothing tells you a man lies under it. From the Han on they piled up a burial mound you could see from far off. The Tang simply hollowed out a whole mountain for the chamber and called it making the mountain the tomb. Even the names refuse to line up. In Guanzhong the villagers call that lump on the surface a grave-lump; through Hunan and Hubei it went into the place names as dun, which is where Jiuliandun and Leigudun come from; further south in Lingnan it becomes a grave-hill.

All of the above can be looked up. The part that resists explanation only appears once you lay the imperial tombs of several ancient civilizations side by side: dig down to the main chamber at the very bottom, and often there are no imperial remains in it.

The official explanations are all reasonable. Robbed long ago; reinterred; a cenotaph from the start. One tomb, two tombs, that holds. But the proportion of empty main chambers runs unusually high, and it runs high regardless of civilization; the stone sarcophagi in those pyramids by the Nile open just as empty.

A few more things, set out for you to think through yourself. In a good many imperial tombs the ratio of width to height in the passage does not suit men carrying a coffin. The stretch hugging the floor is left unusually wide, while the ceiling comes down until a grown man has to bend his back to 70 degrees to get through. Someone measured the cross-sections, and the shape that came out is closer to something that crawls along the ground and runs longer than a man.

In the histories of one dynasty, an emperor is repeatedly recorded as having moved south or toured west, and then vanishing from the record. Where he went, where he was buried, there is no follow-up at all. That way of writing turns up in the official histories too often to be a copyist's omission.

Hardest of all to explain are the figures. In certain royal tombs the burial figures have vertical eyes. The old rule in the kiln trade is that pupils are carved round; only round will hold the human breath in them. Let a vertical pupil come out of a firing and the whole batch goes, mold and all. Yet the vertical lines on those figures are cut deep and true, dozens of them without one out of shape. A craftsman does not carve a pupil vertical for no reason, unless he was carving from something.

Each of these can of course be explained on its own; every one has a normal version.

It is only stacking them together that brings up an uncomfortable thought. If there really is a class of imperial tomb whose main chamber stands empty, and whose passage cross-section and burial-figure eyes both point at the same thing that does not look like a man, then what is buried in there: a "dead emperor," or "the layer the emperor shed and left behind"?