Dynastic History | Ming Xiaoling 明孝陵, Nanjing — The Mound That Has Not Been Opened

Work on 明孝陵 began in 1381, seventeen years before the emperor it was built for died. The empress was buried in it first — the record puts her interment in 1382 — and the complex carries her posthumous title. Zhu Yuanzhang was buried here in 1398. The building accounts close in 1405, under a son who had taken the throne from a nephew by war, so the tomb of the founder was finished by a court with its own reasons for finishing it well.

The labour figure attached to the site, a hundred thousand, appears in the standard accounts without a payroll behind it; it belongs with the city wall's two hundred thousand as an order of magnitude rather than a count. Guard troops are given as five thousand. The spirit way runs about 1,800 metres and bends around an existing hill instead of driving straight at the tomb, which is the feature visitors notice first and the sources explain least.

The Taiping war of the 1850s and 1860s took most of the timber buildings. The stone survived. The Sifangcheng stood roofless until a rebuilding in 2007–2009, and what carries a roof there now is that work, not Ming fabric.

Behind the enclosure wall is a wooded mound covering a chamber that has never been excavated. That is the whole of what can be said about it. In 2003 the tomb was added, together with the Ming tombs north of Beijing, to the UNESCO inscription of the Imperial Tombs of the Ming and Qing Dynasties first made in 2000.

📸 Cover: the Bao Ding treasure mound at Ming Xiaoling, seen over the enclosure wall — the hill covers the unopened chamber. Chainwit., CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons