The Mausoleum of Yao Outside Linfen

The mausoleum lies in Yaodu District, outside the built-up city, in the loess country that runs from the Fen valley up to the hills. Linfen sits in the south-east of the Loess Plateau, and the ground here is the deep, fine soil that makes the terraces and the cut banks of the region: soft enough to be dug, steep enough to erode. A tomb in such ground is a mound rather than a chamber you enter, and the visit is a walk toward it rather than a descent into it. The site is a national key cultural relic, which is the firmest thing that can be said: the protection is documented, the identity of the occupant is not.

Yao is claimed by more than one province. The name itself means the tomb of the emperor Yao, and more than one place has taken it. The Linfen tomb, in Yaodu District, is a national key cultural relic. A second, in Heze in Shandong, is protected only at provincial level. A third claim, for a tomb in Gaoping in Shanxi, is set aside as impossible to verify. For a ruler placed in the third millennium BC, a tomb is where a tradition has settled, and it has settled in several places, with different degrees of official recognition. The Linfen site is the one that belongs to this city, and the one that its own account of Yao points to.

Archaeology has given the legend a landscape but not a grave. The strongest argument for a Yao capital in this part of Shanxi comes from Taosi, in Xiangfen County, where a walled Longshan city and a platform read as an observatory were excavated; Chinese archaeologists have argued that this was the seat of Yao, and the city's Yaodu District takes its name from the tradition. No such evidence attaches to the tomb. What can be said is that the mound is protected, that it belongs to a set of competing claims, and that its interest is as a place of continuing observance - a fixed point in the loess above the river rather than a documented burial.