Shengshishan Chambered Cairn Tomb Cluster

Shengshishan Chambered Cairn Tomb Cluster

Shengshishan Chambered Cairn Tomb Cluster is a Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Relics Protection Unit.

Shengshishan Chambered Cairn Tomb Cluster (Provincial-Level Cultural Relics Protection Unit)

Era: Spring and Autumn & Warring States Periods

Announcement Date: March 16, 2005

An ancient tomb cluster. Distributed on the mountaintop and ridges of Shengshishan to the east of Daeifang Village, there are quite a few in number, totaling more than 20. These are chambered cairn tombs, all of which are relatively well preserved. The characteristics of these tombs are: they are all built with unprocessed, irregularly shaped stone blocks to form narrow, elongated burial chambers. The walls of the chambers gradually taper inward toward the top, giving a trapezoidal cross-section. The tops are covered with long stone slabs, and the surroundings as well as the tops of the stone chambers are covered with large amounts of earthen fill, forming an oval-shaped earthen mound on the surface. The scale of the stone chambers varies, with the larger ones being over 30 meters in length, more than 2 meters in bottom width, and over 4 meters in height—very grand in scale. The smaller ones are about 6–8 meters in length, around 1 meter in width, and less than 2 meters in height. The funerary objects inside the tombs are generally stamped hard pottery and proto-porcelain.

Chambered cairn tombs were a major type of burial structure popular in the Yue region during the Spring and Autumn & Warring States Periods and are important surviving relics of Yue culture.

Source: Zhejiang Cultural Relics Network

Further Reading:

· Fifth Batch of Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Relics Protection Units