Funerary expressions on imperial frontiers: Burial caves south of the Yangzi River (2nd to 3rd century CE)

Abstract

This paper documents a previously uncharted area of the Han Empire Southwest frontier, where it identifies an overlooked type of burials in artificial caves dating to the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Until now, this specific funerary tradition located south of the Yangzi river (Changjiang 長江) has been presented as a local effect of the centralized phenomenon of “Han tombs”. As a result, its peculiarities were ascribed to logistical constraints in technology, material and terrain. This research, instead, argues that the man-made caves south of the Yangzi correspond to a distinctive tradition of placing the dead emerging in the last decades of the Eastern Han dynasty.The crucial point made by this research concerns the location of the burial type, which appears to systematically be distribution along secondary fluvial routes. Despite their absence in written history, minor tributaries of the Yangzi river potentially played an important role in interregional communication and trade, in a context of weakened imperial rule. Resting on a field report of two major southern tributaries of the Yangzi – the Chishui and Wu rivers, and a case study of the Qi river, a minor tributary of the Yangzi and an area of concentration of the atypical rock-cut cemeteries, a situational definition for the identity of the cave builders is proposed, in the backstage of imperial presence.Direct field survey conducted by the author in the years 2013–2016 in 63 clusters of burial caves and the compilation of data gathered by other researchers for 562 groups of burial caves and 579 individual burial caves within these groups, shows that, far from being peripheral, the alternative burial type was practiced along a 500 km long section of the upper Yangzi river. This paper highlights the typological and iconographical consistency of the alternative funerary tradition south of the Yangzi river, blooming at the end of the Han dynasty, as compared to cemeteries in the Sichuan basin and the Yangzi gorges.