An artist’s pilgrimage to find relics of the Northern Song in rural China
“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.
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Rediscovering Henan’s Forgotten Imperial Tombs is a story from our issue, “Call of the Wild.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine.
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