Seeing this wall piled up of skulls, a property from a horror film usually comes to the mind. But it's no fiction. Together with the charnel ground (where the sky burials are held), and the hovering vultures in the crystal blue sky, this mysterious world has always been an irresistible attraction on the ridge of the world - Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

  Location

The skull wall is near the Duoduoka Charnel Ground in the western part of Biru County, 300 kilometers on the southeast of Tibetan Autonomous Region 's Naqu Region. The name "Biru" originally meant the "horn of female Tibtan yak", because according to a local saga, a "tribe of female yak" once settled down here.

The skull wall is a result of Tibet's unique sky burial tradition. The Duoduoka Charnel Ground occupies an area of about 4,000 square meters. Earthen walls roughly as tall as a man stand on the ground's four sides. On the south and west walls, there are some wooden shelves, about between four to five stories each, which each shelf displaying some orderly-placed human skulls.

  The skull wall

Except for the Duoduoka Burial Stage where the skulls of the dead are kept and placed on the wall nearby, in other areas of Tibet where the sky burial custom is practiced, the whole human body is fed to the vultures, with not a single part spared.

There are two gates respectively on the west and south of the Duoduoka Charnel Ground's courtyard. The west gate is for living human beings, while the one on the south is where the bodies are carried in. The bungalow on the north is exclusively for the monks who carry out the religious sky burial ceremonies, and inside the rooms are some religious scriptures and figures.

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  Why the skulls are kept?

According to Duoduoka's sky burial master, there were originally three monasteries where skulls were kept in sky burials: the Duoduoka Monastery, the Ridazeng Monastery opposite the former and the Quedai Monastery nearby. Biru has gained its fame from containing all three monasteries. Unfortunately, most of the skulls have been damaged both by natural and manmade disasters. By the early 1980s, most of skulls in the Ridazeng and Quedai monasteries have disappeared, despite a very supportive governmental policy in preserving religious relics.

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Author: Jeff