Tombstone and Buried Table

Towering aloft in Tian'anmen square is the Monument to the People's Heroes. Its face is engraved with eight big characters, gilded and written in the hand of the late Chairman Mao Zedong, reading: “Eternal Glory to the People's Heroes”.At the back is a memorial article authored also by Mao but written out by the late premier Zhou Enlai. The stele is different from all tombstones of past ages.

It is a tombstone without a tomb, but a monument dedicated to all the heroes who have laid down in their lives for the cause of the Chinese people. The monument is over 37 metres tall, and its pedestal, decorated on four sides with 10 sculptures carved in bas-relief on its white marble balustrades. Simple and magnificent, it is also the grandest stele that China has ever built.

To bury a tablet with the dead person was an established practice among the people in old times. The tablet served a similar purpose as the tombstone but, being buried underground, could be preserved much longer.

There seemed to be no fixed form for the muzhi(buried tablet) at the beginning. Some were square at the bottom but round on top, rather like usual tombstones, but most are square. The earliest muzhi ever brought to light in China is the one Jia Wuzhong buried for his dead wife Ma Jiang in A.D. 106 during the Eastern Han.

It is 46 cm high, 58.5 cm across and made of coarse stone, but the engraved text gives a rather detailed description of the dead woman. It is considered an archaeological treasure for its great antiquity.

During the Sui and Tang dynasties (6th to 10th century), the muzhi became finalized in form. As a rule, it consists of two square slabs of identical dimensions, placed one on top of the other. The top piece bears the name, native place and rank of the deceased, while the bottom one his epitaph or biographical account. Incidentally, the epitaph often written in rhyming prose, is also called muzhi or muzhiming. Occasionally, the top stone is sculpted in the shape of a tortoise with its head and legs stuck out and the name of the dead carved on its back.

A set of two buried tablets was unearthed in ShananxiProvince in 1971. It belonged to Yuchi Jingde (585-658), a famed general who helped found the Tang Dynasty. Both pieces, well preserved and finely carved out of smooth, finegrained stone, are square in shape, each measuring 1.2*1.2 metres with a thick ness of 25 centimetres—the largest of such tablets ever unearthed.

Tombstones and buried tablets with their inscriptions, as part of the country's cultural legacy, are an important help to the study of carious subjects—history, ancient geography, development of the Chinese script, the art of calligraphy and of course the dead themselves if they were important figures in their lifetime.