Mural Tombs in Liaoyang are located in the
area of Bangzitai, Sandaohao and Beiyuan in the south of Liaoyang City, Liaoning
Province.
The mural tombs were found in the early
20th century. They were the stone house mural tombs around the end of
the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220BC). The owners of the tombs were all the
grandees in Gongsun's regime in the area of Eastern Liao. In the 1950s, the
museum of Liaoning Province began the excavation of the mural tombs. They
cleaned up a few tombs which were all built of slates. Large-scale tombs consist
of a front room, a rear room, a cloister, left and right side rooms and a number
of small rooms in the cloister, and the plane of the whole tombs take a square
shape with the length and width of about 7 meters. Small tombs consist of front
house, rear house and left and right side rooms, with the length and width about
4-5 m. The funerary objects in each tomb had already been stolen
away.
The
murals in the tombs are directly painted on the stone wall of the coffin
chamber. The topics mainly center on the experience and the life of the tomb
owners. The distributing circs and rules are like this: on both sides of the
door stand servants and watchdogs; in the front house there are paintings of
large-scale acrobatics and dancing performances with musical accompaniment; in
the rear house and cloister, the paintings depict the owner's ranged chariot and
war-horse gong on a long journey; in the rear cloister are people dancing with
musical accompaniment, acrobatics, as well as the residences and dependent
officials; in the side rooms and small houses there are paintings about the tomb
owner's dinner party and the cooking; on the top of each house the patterns of
flowing clouds are painted. The murals are precisely structured with vivid
images and bright colors on them. They are rare materials for the research into
the economy, culture, and living of the noble and rich families in the area of
Eastern Liao at that time.