Nan Yue Mausoleum

This is another really well set up site for public visiting. This is the top of the mausoleum, so what you see is the roof. Above is a steel & glass pyramid that is approximately congruent with the hill that has been removed to ge to the tomb. So it's still possible to get a feeling from outside of how this hill fitted into the surrounding landscape. It's also possible to go down into the mausoleum itself, which is smallish, but with seven rooms (Tutankanem only had four, if there is any point in the comparison).

The contents have been put into an adjoining museum - whose architect must have had a fair sense of humour because the museum has both its own "Louvre-like" pyramid, repeating the theme of this one here, and "Egyptian-esque" external bas-reliefs. So far as i know, any connection with Egypt is coincidence, so I guess the museum design might be a tad tendentious. Still, it made me smile. Possibly another coincidence is the vast amount of Egyptian artiface looted by the french under Napoleon - so the Louvre reference is also apposite.

What a fantastic thing archaeology is. (Probably not the world's easiest career though.) The Nan Yue mausoleum is one of 2 Nan Yue sites in Guangzhou, the other being the palace which I mentioned elsewhere. The mausoleum is, so far as anybody knows anyway, a vastly simpler site. Just one mausoleum, nothing before, nothing after. When you think of the amount of pillaging of tombs that went on in, say, Egypt, and I assume in parts of China too although I haven't researched that yet, it's extraordinary that this one was excavated completely untouched in 1983. I mean there it was, a bloody great mound sitting in the middle of the suburbs, untouched for 2000+ years. No legends of buried treasure? No idle curiosity?

In the nineteenth century somebody built gun emplacements on one side of it, and no accidental discoveries.

Along comes another developer, starts digging up the hill to build an apartment block and suddenly, there it is. Imagine how unbelievably excited the archaeology department must have been. It's a small site, but it is really really interesting. Actually small sites are better in some ways for the tourist; you don't get quite the same feeling of scratching the surface (of course you are, but feelings do count). I've been back once since the first visit, and I'll probably go back another couple of times. I get museum burnout because there's really too much to think about & since I don't really know exactly what to look for/at, it can be a bit confusing. I think museums generally do a lousy job of providing supporting information & context. This one actually tries pretty hard, but my museum Chinese is, well, underdeveloped.

I can't claim to be such a great artifact photographer - it's a "no flash" museum as well, but here are a couple of my favourite things.

This chap was holding up the base of one section of a massive seven-part Chinese screen. If you can get a screen-sized view of it, he has a fine demonic grin and vicious teeth. He doesn't look remotely like anything I associate with "Chinese" - which I freely admit may be ignorance on my part - I would have guessed Central American.

Or alternatively, an early prototype for a computer game.




This "rhyton" is much more stunning than the photograph - the jade is translucent, and amazingly thin. I've seen a lot of jade in China, and frankly I'm starting to think that plastic is rarer and more intersting, but this restores jade to its proper place in the preciousness scheme of things. It's a piece that makes me start to understand the evil collector mentality - wanting it is very easy.

Drinking horns always make me think of Norse gods (Thor in particular, drinking the ocean to create the tides) and the chosen translation into Greek makes it hard to avoid thinking westwards, but of course, anybody hanging around with horned animals is highly likely to work out that the horns make good cups. And Guangzhou is, don't forget, the city of five sheep/rams/goats. So, no jumping to conclusions.




This is another of those things - again I don't know how clearly you can see the picture, but the carving is very finely detailed. There's a dragon, a phoenix & a rhinoceros in there if you look hard enough. It's a clasp, somewhat more elaborate than the hooks-and-eyes of the pre-velcro cheap fastener.

One of the small things that I liked about it is that it had been broken and mended in its original lifetime; so he may have been the Nan Yue emperor, but he wasn't a nothing-that-isn't-perfect-enters-my-sight kind of emperor. More frugal. Better balanced. Perhaps not quite so rich.

Calling him an Emperor is something of an ambit claim, in point of fact. I have also seen him described as a governor. Certainly his grandfather started off in the South as the governor of the Qin empire - but Qin didn't last long & in the time it took the Han dynasty to get itself organised the Qin-colonised Yue areas naturally acquired a degreee of independence. And from the Han dynasty point of view, an independent kingdom of Han ethnic stock in the South wasn't a high priority, so long as they weren't too independent. So it made sense for them to authorise/collaborate in the Nan Yue kingdom. Of course, eventually all that independence and talikng about kingdoms got the local people unduly excited, and the Han acquired an emperor whose idea of control was more focussed on physical control, and thus after 4 generations (and in a pragmatic sense 3, because the last generation of infant emperor probably wasn't more than a dying optimistic gasp) the Nan Yue kingdom was no more. (But see the history of Vietnam for an alternative view of events)