Liudingshan: Princess Jeonghye’s Tomb and Stele

South of Dunhua, Princess Jeonghye’s burial is marked by an earthen mound on a sheltered slope. A passage leads to a square chamber built from basalt blocks. Its walls narrow overhead in a corbelled roof, each course projecting inward until the stones meet. The chamber measures about 2.8 metres across and nearly 2.7 metres high; a brick floor and a large flat stone formed the coffin platform.

The construction gives the tomb a precise shape: a room below ground, reached through a passage and capped by a rising stone ceiling. The burial belongs to Balhae’s royal world. Its material story begins with a chamber of carefully laid basalt, then continues through a memorial stele and a pair of carved guardians found at the entrance.

The tomb inscription identifies Jeonghye as the second daughter of King Mun of Balhae. “Jeonghye” is a posthumous title, bestowed after her death. A Korean historical account says she died in 777 at age 40 and was buried on Zhenling’s western slope in 780. It also recounts her marriage, the early death of her husband and the loss of a young son.

The dates make the memorial more than a royal label. A woman born in the eighth century was buried three years after her death in a landscape of royal tombs, with a carved inscription that recorded her kinship and place in the dynasty. The stele’s formal prose and the chamber’s stonework preserve two different kinds of memory: one written, one built.

In August 1949, a team from Yanbian University and Qidong Middle School cleared tombs at Liudingshan and found Jeonghye’s stele in the passage. The granite monument had broken into seven pieces. It is about 90 centimetres high, 49 centimetres wide and 29 centimetres thick, with a pointed top. Its face is arranged in 21 lines and 725 characters; a local heritage account records 491 characters as clearly legible.

The inscription identifies the burial and preserves the dates and relationships associated with the princess. Its scale is human: a stone that can be measured by hand, yet carries a formal record across more than a millennium. The stele is now in the collection of Jilin Provincial Museum in Changchun, linking the tomb at Dunhua to a museum-held object elsewhere in the province.

The 1949 clearing also found a pair of carved stone lions in the passage. One crouches with its hind legs folded, front legs raised and mouth open; the other was carved as its counterpart. A local heritage account gives their heights as about 64 and 60 centimetres. Their paired forms stood at the passage into the burial chamber, turning an underground threshold into a guarded entrance.

The lions now sit in separate collections: one at Yanbian Museum and one at Jilin Provincial Museum in Changchun. The tomb’s material record is thus divided among landscape, stone chamber, inscription and sculpture. At Liudingshan the chamber remains in Dunhua; the stele and lions have their own collection histories in museums across the region.

Liudingshan helped make Dunhua a leading candidate for Dongmou Mountain, an early political center named in accounts of Balhae’s founding. A 2021 study by historian Sun Hao traces how that interpretation changed as researchers re-examined sites around Dunhua and studied early Balhae remains in the Yanji Basin. Some features once used to support the older theory were assigned to later periods, and the Yanji Basin explanation has gained prominence.

The Liudingshan tomb itself is identified by its inscription with King Mun’s daughter. The wider debate concerns where Balhae’s earliest center stood, a question shaped by historical geography and new archaeology. Dunhua’s royal tombs remain important evidence even as the map of the kingdom’s beginnings continues to be refined.