The Stone Tomb Chamber of Huan Tui

The Huan Tui Stone Tomb Chamber

The Huan Tui Stone Tomb Chamber is a cultural tourism attraction.

The Stone Tomb of Huan Tui is located on the western foothills of Mount Huan in Dongshan Village, Maocun Town, Tongshan District. The Huan Tui Stone Tomb Chamber is the tomb of Huan Tui, the Sima of the Song State during the Spring and Autumn Period. The tomb features a sloped passageway carved directly into the mountain, with numerous stone carvings on both sides of the passage, most of which were created around the Yuan and Ming dynasties. Due to years of weathering, many inscriptions have become blurred. The walls of the tomb passage feature four regular script characters reading “Huan Tui Stone Chamber,” handwritten by Yang Mao, the military superintendent of the Emperor’s transport service during the Ming Dynasty. In the third year of the Zhengde era (1508), imperial envoy Fu Lun, the Guangdong transport supervisor, visited Xuzhou and inscribed a poem on the stone chamber. When Su Shi served as the prefect of Xuzhou, he visited Mount Huan multiple times and left behind over ten poems and essays documenting his experiences.

The earliest recorded mention of the tomb on Mount Huan appears in the Commentary on the Water Classic by Li Daoyuan of the Northern Wei Dynasty. Based on legend, Li Daoyuan confirmed that the tomb belonged to Huan Tui, the Sima of the Song State from the late Spring and Autumn Period, a view that later generations have generally accepted. However, some recent research suggests that this interpretation is a form of “association” and argues that it is actually a tomb from the Western Han Dynasty, possibly “either a satellite tomb of the King of Chu’s tomb at Beidongshan or a tomb of a king of Chu from a certain generation of the Western Han.”

Maocun Town: Located eight kilometers north of Xuzhou City, Maocun Town covers an area of 84 square kilometers and has a population of 65,000.

The town has a long history and numerous cultural relics, including rare Han Dynasty stone reliefs, the Beidongshan Han Tomb, the Caiwang historical site, and the tomb of Huan Kui of the Sima family. Among these, the Han Dynasty stone reliefs, along with Suzhou gardens, Taihu Lake in Wuxi, and the ancient city wall of Nanjing, are listed as one of Jiangsu's “Four Treasures.”

The town is divided into northern and southern sections by the Bulao River. The northern part consists of hills with higher elevation, suitable for forestry and fruit cultivation, while the southern part is a plain with well-developed networks of roads, canals, and tree lines, serving as a major area for double-cropping of rice and wheat... More details about Maocun Town++