Hanging Coffins in Gongxian
With nearly 300 well-preserved hanging coffins, Gongxian County of southwest China’s Sichuan province is known as China’s natural museum of hanging coffins.These coffins are also known as the “Hanging Coffins of Bo People”. The Bo people were an ethnic minority group living along the borders of today’s Sichuan and and southwest China’s Yunnan Province who created a brilliant culture as early as 3,000 years ago.
Hanging coffins was the widespread form of burial in ancient southern China. Different from those of other minority groups, the hanging coffins of the Bo people were not painted. However, this practice ended with the mysterious disappearance of the Bo people. Those who came after knew of the only from the hanging coffins and the paintings they left behind like faint echoes on the cliffside.
There are three types of hanging coffins. Some are cantilevered out on wooden stakes (in other words, some coffins lie on beams projecting from structures such as mountains),. Others are placed in caves. The third kind sit on projections in the rock and are mainly clustered around Matangba and Sumawan where some 100 coffins are hung on the limestone cliffs on both sides of the 5,000-meter-long Bochuangou.
The most recent hanging coffins in Gongxian County were made around 400 to 500 years ago in the middle and later periods of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), while many of the earliest ones date back 1,000 years to the Song Dynasty (960-1279). These coffins were hung at least 10 meters above the ground with the highest ones reaching 130 meters.
http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_curiosity/2004-10/26/content_62633.htm
Tags: China, RTW Trip
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