The Baoshan Cemetery, Jingmen, Hubei Province
Creators: name: Guo, Jue
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2022

description: In ancient China burial grounds and cemeteries were not only place of veneration and commemoration, but also sites of ritualized communication and social interaction between the world of the living and the unseen realm. The Baoshan cemetery 包山 is located in present Jingmen 荊門, Hubei Province 湖北, formerly the heartland of the Chu Kingdom 楚 (ca. 1050-223 BCE). It is one of the best-preserved nuclear family burial grounds for Chu nobility. Its location, spatial layout, burial structure design, and entombed contents provide a rare glimpse into the material, religious, and social worlds of the aristocratic elite in the late Warring States period (ca. 4th-3rd centuries BCE) in southern China. The Baoshan cemetery was discovered during the mandatory archaeological survey in this area—known for its rich cultural deposits— prior to the construction of the Jing-Sha railway in 1986 and was scientifically excavated in 1987. The Baoshan cemetery is located on a ridge—a typical topographical feature of the rolling hilly lands in the region and prized burial location of high-ranking nobles of the Chu Kingdom—that is about 16 kilometers north of the archaeological site (Jinancheng 紀南城) of the capital city (Qi Ying 郢 ) of the Chu Kingdom roughly from 400 BCE to 278 BCE. The Baoshan cemetery consists of four tumular tombs (M1, M2, M4, and M5) that were dated to the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. Archaeologists have identified these four tombs to be the resting place for a family of two generations headed by Shao Tuo 卲 (b. ca. 356 BCE), who, until his death in 316 BCE, was Minister on the Left (which seems to be primarily in charge of civil administration including maintaining social order and regulating economic affairs for both the nobility and common households) at the royal court of King Huai of Chu楚懷王 (r. 328-299 BCE). Shao Tuo was buried in the largest and the only intact tomb M2 at the cemetery. The other three tombs had unfortunately but unsurprisingly been looted since the antiquity and were poorly preserved at the time of the excavation. Immediate to the north of M2, in the slightly better preserved M4, archaeologists unearthed another male skeleton of 25-30 years of age at the time of the death and entombed weapons, often used as a gender marker for males. Based on the location and remaining entombed goods, the tomb occupant of M4 was believed to be a son of Shao Tuo. No skeletal remains were found in M1 and M5 and the identities of their occupants are inferred—wife of Shao Tuo and wife of Shao Tuo’s son respectively—based on the location of their tomb in relation to M2 and M4 and the remaining entombed goods, especially the absence of weapons. In contrast, Shao Tuo’s tomb (M2) was not only richly furnished but also remarkably preserved, attested by 1,935 pieces/sets of exquisite grave goods and three types of manuscript texts written in the distinct Chu script using brush and ink on bamboo slips, which provide the critical information on the identity of Shao Tuo, his lifeworld, and the anticipated afterlife of the elite like him. These invaluable bamboo manuscripts are among the best preserved and scientifically excavated corpuses dated to the 4th century BCE in China. They include selected administrative documents of the Chu royal court and local governments of seven years (323-317 BCE), Shao Tuo’s personal divination and sacrifice records of three years (318-316 BCE), and funerary inventory lists prepared for his burial in 316 BCE. According to the divination and sacrifice records, Shao Tuo was a fifth-generation royal descendant of King Zhao of Chu 楚昭 王 (r. 515-489 BCE) and a member of the influential Shao (a.k.a., Zhao in the received sources) lineage whose immediate ancestors—great grandfather, grandfather, and his father—and himself served in various high-ranking positions for generations in the Chu Kingdom. The Baoshan cemetery was located in an area (i.e., within 25 kilometers radius) where large-scale tumular elite burials like that of Shao Tuo were abundant, clearly separating them from the cemeteries containing small to medium sized tombs that dotted around the immediate vicinity of the capital city site (i.e., within 5 kilometers radius). Baoshan M2 had a man-made earthen mound of a remaining height of 5.8 meters above the ground at the time of the excavation, which the locals nicknamed Baoshan, or “Bump Hill,” and after which the cemetery site was conventionally named by the archaeologists. Underneath the burial mound, a reverse-pyramid shaped earthen grave pit was dug with a broad upper opening (31.9x34.4m) and 14-steps gradually going down to the narrower bottom (7.8x6.85m) of the grave pit, 12.45 meters below the ground surface. Baoshan M2 had one tomb ramp of 19.8 meters long facing east. The earthen steps and the tomb ramp serve architectural and pragmatic functions of securing the wall of the large pit from collapsing during construction and transporting grave goods during the burial. However, scholars who follow the traditional ritual prescriptions recorded in the transmitted sources also contend that the number of steps and tomb ramps, which are not specifically stipulated in the ritual compendia, is an indicator of social status subjected to sanctuary rules. It is debatable whether idealized ritual prescriptions were followed, or to what degree sanctuary rules were practiced, however, what becomes clear as more tombs of similar scales like Baoshan M2 have come to light through archaeological work, they exhibit certain common architectural features and spatial designs, suggesting shared funerary traditions and conceptualizations of death and the afterlife among the high elite of the time. A box-like burial structure (waiguo 外槨 “outer casket”), measuring (W)6.26x(L)6.32x(H)3.1m, large enough to be a good sized room, was built using 102 pieces of large and small timber logs inside a smaller earthen pit dug at the bottom of the larger grave pit. This burial structure was divided into five compartments, with the middle one containing the coffins of the deceased minister and the surrounding four compartments filled with objects that had been used in his life and things that were prepared for the afterlife, for example, the administrative documents from his office and blank bamboo slips as well as writing instruments, the latter of which are best understood to be for his continuous use in the afterlife. Shao Tuo’s burial was richly provisioned. It is especially worth noting the groupings of entombed objects in different compartments and how the interred funerary lists shed light on the design of the burial space that helps us gain unprecedented understanding of how death and the afterlife were spatialized and conceptualized by the elite like Shao Tuo of the time. Take the eastern compartment as an example. It was filled with bronze vessels, lacquerware, pottery containers, and bamboo baskets that seem to correspond to items in the funerary lists: “copper vessels from the grand kitchen” (dapao zhi jinqi 大庖之金器), “wooden vessels” (muqi 木器), “bamboo utensil baskets to be placed in the dining chamber” (shishi suoyi zhiluo 食室所以置笿), and “foodstuff for the dining chamber” (shishi zhi shi 食室之食). The eastern compartment therefore may have been conceptualized as the “dining chamber” for Shao Tuo to continuously enjoy his meals in the afterlife. Similarly, the northern compartment contains items that one would find in a study or office for a literate elite like Shao Tuo: a wooden low-table, a sitting mat, small bronze oil lamps, wooden attendant figurines, a zither, writing utensils of brush and scribal scrapper, and bamboo manuscript documents. Additionally, while the southern compartment was equipped with disassembled chariots and fittings, as well as weapons that were suitable to Shao Tuo’s elite social and economic status, the western compartment was furnished with, among other things, an exquisitely designed folding bed, two sword-wearing attendant wooden figurines, and remains of textile items. In the funerary lists, there was an entry on “items for traveling to relocate [to the afterlife]” (xiangxi zhiqi suoyi xing相徙之器所以行) in which a “foldable bed” (shouchuang 收牀), along with many types of shoes, caps, and kerchiefs were recorded. Lastly, the middle compartment was bolstered with a similar box-like but smaller wooden structure (neiguo 内槨 “inner casket”), in which three nested and exquisitely lacquer-painted coffins were placed. The body of Shao Tuo, layers of blankets and clothes, and personal items such as swords and jade ornaments were found in the inner most coffin that contained his body. The entombed objects and the funerary lists in Baoshan M2 together shed new light on the ritual process that Shao Tuo’s death and subsequent burial had initiated and the material world in which they were embedded. The most significant source of information about the religious world in which Shao Tuo lived are the divination and sacrifice records that were interred with him. It should be noted that similar divination records have been found in other tombs that also dated to the 4th century BCE in the broadly defined former Chu cultural regions in present Hubei and Henan provinces. Since the 1960s, at least 11 tombs from large-scale ones to medium sized have yielded such kind of records, some of which contained the same name of a particular diviner. This suggests that such divination was probably practiced by a wider circle of Chu elites. However, these entombed records greatly varied in numbers from several hundreds to one single slip, partly reflecting the status of the patrons, and partly due to their different degree of preservation. The records found in Shao Tuo’s tomb are by far the best preserved and thus most complete, giving us a fuller picture of not only the highly formulaic format but also the complex relations between the living world and the unseen realm of the spirits. The Baoshan divination and sacrifice records were written on 54 bamboo slips (67.1-69.6cm), containing 22 times of divinations and 4 times of sacrifices performed by professional diviners and ritualists on behalf of Shao Tuo in the last three years of his life (318- 316 BCE). Shao Tuo’s diviners used similar methods—cracking (bu卜) and casting (shi 蓍)—that had been used for almost a millennium in the northern Shang and Zhou traditions. Unlike the Shang oracle bones that recorded terse information directly on the cracked turtle shells and animal bones, or referencing the hexagram interpretations as they are collected in the Changes of Zhou (Zhouyi 周易), the Chu divination and sacrifice was narrated on bamboo slips that focus on prescribing efficacious ritual actions to address the diagnosed problems believed to be inflicted by the spiritual world. It was common to have multiple diviners to perform repeated divinations on the same topic, usually on the same day, each proposing a course of ritual actions. For example, in the Baoshan records, a total of ten divinations were performed by five different diviners, each doing two rounds, not long before Shao Tuo’s death, in 316 BCE. However, as the Baoshan sacrifice records show, not all prescriptions were followed through and only selected proposals of ritual actions were carried out. The topics of divination and sacrifice in the case of Shao Tuo fall into two categories. As Minister on the Left at the Chu royal court, diviners periodically—more precisely in the case of Shao Tuo, annually, based on the interred three-year records—divined on Shao Tuo’s service to the king and his prospect of obtaining more noble titles. Then in early 317 BCE, Shao Tuo seemed to have developed some acute illness in his abdomen that prevented him from eating, and subsequently divinations on the prospect of his physical wellbeing became more frequent. Shao Tuo’s illness gradually progressed and then quickly worsened toward the end of 317 BCE, and he died less in a year, in 316 BCE. Although the concerns that initiated the divination varied, these highly formulaic records show that they shared the basic mechanism of addressing the issues of concern, that is, to communicate with a broad spirit world that included not only the former kings of Chu and lineage ancestors of Shao Tuo as well as family members who met unfortunate or untimely death, but also forces of the land, especially spirits of mountains and rivers. Similarly, sacrificial offerings in a variety of manners, as proposed in their respective divinations, were given by ritualists on behalf of Shao Tuo, sometimes at different locations depending on the recipients of the offerings. What remains unclear is why the bamboo manuscripts including administrative documents and records of divination and sacrifice found in Baoshan M2 were buried with the deceased Shao Tuo in his carefully constructed and deliberately curated tomb. One possible explanation is to consider the underlying conceptualization of burial at the time for elites like Shao Tuo, which may not be the place that marks the end of a narrowly defined physical or biological existence but a site for a broadly defined social life that continuously involves actors of both the living and the spiritual.