The first day of our Great Wall tour took us to the Olympic Village and Ming Tombs. We arrived at the Olympic Village on a horribly rainy day and were bombarded by Chinese people on bikes trying to sell us umbrellas and ponchos. I hate hate hate being out in the rain so although I already had a raincoat and umbrella, I bought a poncho and I’m so glad I did—it was the best poncho ever! It had actual sleeves and a drawstring hood so it kept my entire upper half extremely dry (I’m still waiting for the invention of poncho pants and shoes). The Olympic Village was cool and we saw the Bird’s Nest and the Cube where all the swimming events were held, but we all happily rushed through it to get out of the rain.
After the Olympic Village we drove an hour or so to the Ming Tombs. It’s a 46 sq km area where 13 of the 16 Ming emperors are buried—each has a few sq km complex for their individual tomb, and only one has been dug up and restored set up for visitors. The entrance to the area has a main road lined with stone animals and stone people, and the road lies on the same longitude (or is it latitude?) as the main road in the Forbidden City.
The discovery of the only visitor-friendly tomb in the early 1900s was similar to the mystique in uncovering the tombs in the pyramids in Egypt, and as such there are many superstitions surrounding the tomb. You cannot touch anything once you enter the tomb, you have to leave an offering of money, and I don’t remember the other two. The actual, underground tomb is surrounded by above-ground gardens and buildings. The heavenly gate serves as the entrance to the complex, and humans are not supposed to walk through the gate as it serves as the entrance to heaven for spirits. If you accidentally walk through, you’re supposed to wipe yourself off and repeat over and over “I’m still on earth. I’m still on earth. I’m still on earth.” so you don’t accidentally get sent to heaven.
To get into the tomb, you have to go underground something like 90 feet and the tomb consists of a series of rooms. The first was the empress’ tomb room, which was empty (I’ll explain why in a bit). The next was the middle room with the thrones of the emperor and empress, the final was the emperor’s tomb room. Here were three large, red boxes that were replicas of the coffins of the emperor and the empress. I asked the tour guide why the empresses were buried in the emperor’s tomb room, and he told me that it was because the halls leading to the empresses’ tomb rooms were made to narrow to fit the coffins, so they just placed them next to the emperor.
Another question I had was where the original coffins were. During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s-1970s, the tombs were raided and coffins and other valuables were stolen. A spooky legend that deals with this and is documented by the Chinese government is as follows: The local villagers who stole one of the coffins were afraid of getting caught so they broke it down and made a bureau from the wood. An elderly couple had the bureau in their house, and soon after they both died of a mysterious disease. The bureau was passed to a couple with four children, and the couple left the children at home while they went to a neighboring village for a period of time. When they got home, they couldn’t find any of their kids and searched for them for hours and hours. The last place they checked was bureau, and inside it they found their four children, all dead. The children had been hiding in the bureau, and the lock was such that it locked from the outside and the children got trapped inside and starved to death. There were claw marks from where the kids had tried to get out. Years later, the couple had more children and somehow they ended up dead too. The Chinese believe the bureau is cursed because it was made out of wood stolen from the tomb. ::Insert creepy music here::
Pictures: In front of the Bird's Nest; The grounds of the Ming Tombs
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