Work and celebration painted on tomb bricks

The Xincheng tomb group lies about eighteen kilometres east of central Jiayuguan. The city’s heritage account reports more than 600 painted bricks from the tombs, with scenes of herding, farming, military posts, hunting, travel, relay transport, music and dance. These small images bring the social world of the third to fifth centuries into view through repeated, everyday motifs. The tombs are a separate archaeological site from Jiayuguan’s Ming fortress, built many centuries later.

The painted scenes place labor beside movement and celebration. A field or herd shares the visual world with a journey, a military camp or a banquet. Their value lies partly in this range: the bricks show how burial art gathered activities that mattered to families and communities. The city account describes the painting as an important source for the history of Wei–Jin art and society. Read together, the scenes offer evidence about agriculture and transport in the corridor, while remaining funerary images made for tomb interiors.

The tomb group was included in the fifth batch of nationally protected sites in 2001. Its name links the orchard area and Xincheng, the town where the tombs are distributed. Visitors moving from the Ming fortress to the tomb site change both period and subject: a defensive architecture gives way to painted burial chambers. On the bricks, people farm, travel and gather; the images make the region’s earlier life visible before Jiayuguan became the monumental western end of the Ming wall.