Dynastic History|Fuling, Shenyang — The Tomb Finished After the Court Had Gone

Nurhaci died on 30 September 1626 of wounds taken at Ningyuan, at a place outside Shenyang. His successors then coerced his principal consort, Lady Abahai, into suicide so that she would accompany him in death; three other women of his household were also made to follow. Work on his tomb began three years later, in 1629, and was not finished until 1651 — by which time the court that had ordered it had been in Beijing for seven years.

The walled precinct covers roughly 194,800 square metres on the slope of Tianzhu Mountain, with the Hun River below it. The plan follows Ming imperial funerary convention closely: a spirit way with paired stone animals, a stele pavilion, a sacrificial hall, and a walled burial mound behind. Nurhaci lies here with the consort the dynasty later titled Empress Xiaocigao. Kangxi and Qianlong both added buildings while travelling east to perform the ancestral rites, so the fabric a visitor walks through is a century and a half of accumulation rather than one campaign of work.

The state that maintained the place ended in 1912. In 1929 the Shenyang municipal authorities opened the grounds as a public park, which is why the tomb is still signposted on city maps as 東陵, the East Tomb, and why the ticket gate now belongs to a municipal park rather than a board of rites. In 2004 it was inscribed with Zhaoling and Yongling as the Three Imperial Tombs of the Qing Dynasty in Liaoning, an extension of the Ming and Qing imperial tombs World Heritage listing.

📸 Cover: the stele pavilion and sacrificial court inside the Fuling precinct, Gary Lee Todd, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons