Dynastic History|Yongling, Xinbin — Ancestors Made After the Fact

The smallest of the three Qing tombs in Liaoning sits in a river valley in Xinbin, about a hundred kilometres east of Shenyang, below a hill the dynasty later named Qiyunshan. It was built in 1598, when the family that would take Beijing was a Jurchen lineage holding a Ming commission, and it was then called 興京陵. The name 永陵, the eternal tomb, came in 1659, by which time the court was in Beijing and needed the place to carry more weight than a family graveyard.

Four forebears of Nurhaci are honoured here, and the furthest back is the most instructive. Möngke Temür (1370–1433) was a chieftain of the Odoli Jurchen who held a Ming appointment as commander of the Jianzhou Left Guard, and who had earlier been given a title by Joseon; he was killed in 1433 in a revolt led by one of his own battalion officers. He survives in the archives of the Ming frontier system and in Korean records — that is, in the paperwork of the states around him, as their officer. More than two centuries later the Qing court gave him the temple name 肇祖, Founding Ancestor, and a posthumous imperial title, conferred during the Shunzhi reign. A man documented as a functionary of the dynasty the Qing displaced was written backwards into their line as its origin.

That is much of what a dynastic tomb is for. The complex itself is modest — timber halls with tiled roofs inside a stone-walled enclosure, no great avenue of stone animals — and it was inscribed as World Heritage in 2004 with Fuling and Zhaoling. It is open to visitors.

📸 Cover: the sacrificial halls inside the Yongling enclosure, Shallowell, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons