Dynastic History|Cheonmachong, Daereungwon — The Tomb Opened for Practice

The excavation was a rehearsal. In 1973 an investigation team of the Cultural Properties Management Bureau, the office that then ran Korea's heritage, wanted experience before opening the vast mound known as Hwangnam 98, and chose a smaller neighbour to learn on. Tomb 155 was not small. Under a mound 47 m across and 12.7 m high lay the arrangement Silla built for its highest dead — a wooden chamber sealed beneath a cairn of river stones and earth — holding a lacquered coffin and 11,526 objects: a gold crown, a gold cap, a girdle hung with jade, and, on a saddle flap of layered birch bark, the painted white horse that gave the tomb the name it carries now, 天馬塚.

What the mound does not hold is a name. Silla's great tombs bear no inscription, so an occupant has to be argued rather than read. The report proposed King Jijeung, who died in 514; the radiocarbon estimate published with it centres considerably earlier, and the question has stayed open. Nothing records who carried the stones, either. A cairn on this scale is the work of a great many people the court's chroniclers never counted.

The mound was left open after the dig. Visitors walk into it today, through Daereungwon's park of grassed tumuli, to a reconstruction of the chamber as the excavators met it; the crown and the saddle-flap painting are held by the Gyeongju National Museum.

📸 Cover: the reconstructed burial chamber inside the mound — a display, not the original deposit. Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2019, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.