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Mural Tombs in Liaoyang

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.

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