Here be dragons.

A European dragon.

Dragons have long had a place in European mythology. In medieval times those areas of the world that had not been explored were labelled on maps as ‘Here be Dragons’, ‘Here be Sea Monsters’. Chivalrous knights rescued damsels from these fire breathing creatures. One of the central figures of Christianity, Saint George, patron saint of England, is depicted slaying a dragon.

In China, by contrast, the dragon has for millennia figured prominently and positively in the culture of its people. It was the symbol of the emperor, who sat on the dragon throne. It is depicted in many forms in the imperial Ming Tombs  -  in sculpture, painting and on the emperor’s robes.

Dragons are the centrepiece of Chinese mythology and folklore. They possess a range of auspicious powers, especially that of controlling water, rain and floods. As China was, until this century, an agrarian society and as there can be no agriculture without water, so the people came to see the dragon as essential to their survival.

A Chinese dragon.

Most dragons are depicted as serpent-like with four legs. As with many other imaginary creatures their body parts resemble those of real life animals. The dragon is said to have the head of a crocodile, the antlers of a deer, the eyes of a demon, the ears of a cow, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle and the soles of a tiger. It has one hundred and seventeen scales, eighty-one of positive essence (yáng) and thirty-six of negative essence (yīn). The dragon is also closely associated with the number nine, a most auspicious number in Chinese culture. The number of scales on its body, including those that are positive and those that are negative, is divisible by nine. It is a composite of nine actual animals and there are nine sons of the dragon.

Although descriptions of dragons are legion there appear to be three main types: the lóng which lives in the sky, the hornless chī that lives in the sea and the scaly jiāo that inhabits mountainous regions. They are also classified according to the number of claws they have: the five-clawed lóng and the four-clawed and three-clawed măng lóng. The image of the five-clawed dragon, the most powerful of its kind, was reserved for the exclusive use of the emperor and was his totem  -  the symbol of his strength and imperial power.

A Who’s Who of Indian princely titles.

Before researching A History of the Indian Princely States I knew that traditional Indian rulers were not all styled rajas or maharajas but I was nevertheless surprised at the range of titles the 600 or so rulers did hold. Most Hindu rulers were called rajas with the more important of them being called maharajas. Muslim states were usually ruled by a nawab. Amongst the more unusual titles were: the Bhumia of Chhota Barkhera, the Chogyal of Sikkim, the Darbar Sahib of Chotila, the Gaekwar of Baroda, the Jam of Nawanagar, the Khan of Kalat, the Kunwar of Saraikela, the Lyngdoh of Langiong, the Maharawal of Dungapur, the Mehtar of Chitral, the Mir of Hunza, the Ngwegunhmu of Namtok, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Rana of Bhajji, the Sardar of Jirang, the Sawbwa of Mongpawn, the Siem of Langrin, the Thakur Saheb of Rajkot and the Wali of Swat.

The Nizam of Hyderabad was the ruler of the largest princely state in India and the richest man in the world.

The Wali of Swat, ruler of a small princely state in present day Pakistan.

The death and resurrection of the Ming Tombs

During the uprising that toppled the Ming dynasty in 1644, marauding rebels ransacked many of the tombs and torched them in their advance on Beijing. Some of the tombs sustained further damage during the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) but were repaired by the Qing government when peace was restored. The necropolis survived the ravages of the Japanese invasion and occupation of China (1931-45) and the civil war between the nationalists and the communists that followed.

The Manchus, who overthrew the Ming and established the Qing dynasty, respected the ancestral tombs of China’s former rulers as part of their efforts to bring harmony to relations between their Han and Manchu subjects. The first Qing emperor rebuilt the tomb of the last Ming emperor’s favourite concubine to accommodate the remains of the emperor himself. In 1785 the Qianlong emperor, one of the greatest rulers of the Qing dynasty, restored the Zhao Ling, the tomb the twelfth Ming emperor, after it had been struck by lightning and fallen into disrepair.

Aerial view of the restored Zhao Ling, tomb of the twelfth Ming Emperor, taken in 2020.

Since the time of the Zhou dynasty (1046-221 BCE) it was the custom for a new dynasty to grant a title, along with land or a stipend, to a member of the dynasty which had been overthrown so that he could offer ritual, commemorative sacrifices to his imperial ancestors. In 1725 the Qing emperor selected Zhu Zhilian to perform the funerary rites at the Ming Tombs and granted him the hereditary title of marquis, an honorific which those who followed in his position also carried down through twelve generations of Ming descendants until the fall of the Qing dynasty and the end of imperial rule in China in 1912. In 1929 Chinese government relieved the last holder of his title, terminated his duties of carrying out memorial ceremonies at the Ming Tombs and abolished his position. And with that the Ming Tombs ceased to have a functional existence.

The necropolis sank once again into decay until in 2000 the tombs were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List and the Chinese government embarked upon a ambitious restoration project that has seen four of the tombs fully restored.

Photo of the Xian Ling, the tomb of the fourth Ming emperor, taken by the author in 1973.

La Recoleta Cemetery, part 2

The great burial places described in my book of the same name contain the tombs of many famous and powerful women. Two, in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, bear mention.

Remedios de Escalada, María (1797-1823) was the wife of the leader of the Argentine war of independence, General José de San Martín. The Escaladas were prominent in local commerce and became active supporters of the May Revolution of 1810. It was at this time that María met José de San Martín, a general who had recently moved to Buenos Aires after serving in the Peninsular War. They married in 1812. María was fourteen at the time. Her husband’s military responsibilities kept them apart until 1814, when San Martín was appointed Governor of Mendoza Province.

Maria raised huge amounts of money in support of her husband’s efforts to organise and fund the Army of the Andes, a military force that he had raised as part of his campaign to free Chile from Spanish rule. His departure for Chile marked the beginning of a prolonged separation from her husband, during which time she developed tuberculosis. After heading the Protectorate of Peru (1821-22), San Martín travelled to Buenos Aires but Maria died before he arrived. She was 25. She was buried at the La Recoleta Cemetery and the following year San Martín left for France, where he died in exile in 1850.

The most famous person buried in La Recoleta is Evita Perón. María Eva Duarte de Perón (1919-52) was the second wife of Argentine President Juan Perón and served as the First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death in 1952. During this time she was a powerful figure within the pro-Peronist trade unions. She also ran the Ministries of Labour and Health, championed women’s suffrage, and founded and ran the nation’s first large female political party, the Female Peronist Party. In 1951 she made a failed bid for the vice-presidency.

Evita Peron's tomb.

Evita Peron's tomb.

The following year she was given the title of “Spiritual Leader of the Nation” by the Argentine Congress. That same year she died from cancer at the age of 33. Then followed a posthumous odyssey that lasted for 35 years, with burials in Milan, Madrid and at several places in Buenos Aires, including in the grounds of the presidential palace. Finally she was laid to rest in the Duarte family mausoleum in La Recoleta. Almost three million people lined the streets of Buenos Aires for her state funeral. It is easy to miss the stately mausoleum that contains her remains as the name above the entrance is that of her family, Duarte. For security reasons her coffin lies beneath those of her other family members, two levels under the main marble floor.

La Recoleta Cemetery, part 1

There are many poignant stories in my book Great Burial Places, but two that come to mind are about two women buried in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentine.

The tomb of Liliana Crociati de Szaszak is of special interest due to its unusual design. The daughter of an Italian painter and poet, Liliana was enjoying her honeymoon in the Austrian Alps in 1970 when an avalanche struck the hotel in which she and her husband were staying. The 26-year-old was killed, allegedly at that same instant that her beloved dog Sabú died, thousands of kilometers away in Argentina. Designed by her mother and modelled on the room Liliana lived in as a young girl, her tomb is made entirely of wood and glass and features narrow gothic style windows. A plaque displays a poem in Italian, written by her father. A bronze statue of Liliana, tinted bluish-green, stands outside the tomb. She is depicted wearing the wedding dress in which she was buried, her right hand resting on Sabú’s head.

Perhaps the saddest story is that of that of Rufina Cambaceres, a young woman who was buried alive in 1902. She had probably fallen into a coma and a few days after her interment workers heard screams from the tomb but before they could reach her she had died of a heart attack. When the tomb was opened it revealed scratches on her face and on the coffin from her attempts to escape. Her mother then built an art nouveau masterpiece, which has become a symbol of La Recoleta. Her coffin is of Carrara marble, carved with a rose on top and it sits behind a glass wall. A statue of a young girl at the door of the tomb, also in marble, turns her head to those watching her. She looks as if she is about to break into tears as her right hand rests on the door of her own tomb.

Cambaceres tomb

Cambaceres tomb

Where did Sinbad the Sailor get his boat from?

After I had collected the material I needed for a chapter on the European cemeteries at Surat for my book Great Burial Places I hired a car and driver and explored Gujarat for 3 weeks. During my travels I discovered a small town called Salaya (population 30,000). It is located on the far west coast of Gujarat and overlooks the Arabian Sea. It has been a centre of ship building since biblical times.

The boats are built entirely by hand. No machinery, power tools or even working drawings are used.

Channels have been cut into the banks of an estuary that runs in from the sea just south of the town. At low tide a temporary sea wall of rubble and earth is thrown across the entry to the channel to block it off from the estuary. After the last of the residual sea water evaporates the empty channel serves as a dry dock. When a boat is finished the sea wall is removed at low tide and the next high tide floods the channel and floats the boat, which can then be sailed out to deep water.

LB blog. Gujarat. Salaya. Boat building 7.jpg

Until a few decades ago these dhow type boats were powered by sail but these days they are fitted with an engine.

Boats built at Salaya were trading up and down the coast of East Africa, into the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, down past the islands of Indonesia and up the China coast for centuries before the Europeans sailed into view in the 1500s. Built to order by Gujarati and Arab traders, they continue to do so today. 

The finished product: locally built, sea going boats in the harbour at Salaya.

The finished product: locally built, sea going boats in the harbour at Salaya.

What a difference 43 years make.

Recent news about the excavation of one of the Ming Tombs, which are the subject of a chapter in my book Great Burial Places, reminded me of my days living in Beijing in 1973-74.

There were only about 3,000 foreigners in the whole of China in those days and our lives were very circumscribed. There were no foreign tourists. Today there are over half a million foreign residents and they are pretty well free to do what they want and go where they want. 

“Round eyes” (foreigners) were a rare sight in China in 1973.

We could only shop at one department store, the Friendship Store. Only foreigners could use it. Apart from food, local liquor and cigarettes and some small, shoddy, locally made household appliances, it had nothing to offer. The locals shopped with ration cards at small state-run outlets or street markets. (I still have my rice ration card). The last time I went back to China, about five years ago, the main shopping district and the huge shopping malls in every city I visited were stocked with all the luxury goods that you could find in the West.

Everyone wore only Mao outfits. 870 million people all dressed in the same drab, grey unisex outfit. Nobody owned a car. Bicycles were cheap and housing, in drab, Soviet designed apartment blocks, was allocated by the state, as was your job. Today, the streets are jammed with expensive cars and land that was agricultural when I lived there has sprouted forests of high rise luxury apartments.

We couldn’t talk to the locals in the street. If we did, a security man would appear out of the crowd and whisk them away. Now, you can even do homestays.

We weren’t allowed to leave Beijing without the permission of the Foreign Ministry, even to drive the short distance to the Ming Tombs, where we liked to picnic in summer, or the Summer Palace, where we liked to go ice skating in the winter.

Foreigners could only visit a handful of other cities in the whole of China, including Shanghai, Canton and Hangzhou.

Permission was difficult to obtain and, if you were successful, you were accompanied for your every waking moment by a minder. How I appreciated the difference when, a few years ago, I crossed China quite freely from east to west by bus and train. From Xian I followed the ancient Silk Road to Kashgar and over the Torugart Pass through the Tian Shan mountains into Kyrgyzstan and thence Uzbekistan.

Despite all the restrictions of living in Beijing in the 1970s I, and everyone I served with in the Embassy, fell in love with China-  the history, the culture, the landscape, the food and so many other aspects of one of the world’s great root civilisations.

Burial on the Roof of the World.

In doing the research for Great Burial Places I came across some really interesting sites which, although they didn’t fit the criteria for inclusion in my book, were, nevertheless, fascinating. One of them is the Potala Palace in Lhasa.

The Potala Palace, the iconic symbol of Tibet, is a massive structure of rammed earth and stone walls, 300 meters high, topped by the White Palace, the Red Palace and ancillary buildings that have been the winter palace of the Dalai Lama and the seat of the government of Tibet since it was built by the fifth Dalai Lama in the 1650s.

The two palaces rise thirteen storeys and contain over 1,000 rooms, including audience halls, ceremonial halls, libraries, study halls, chapels and the private quarters of the Dalai Lama. The palaces house 10,000 shrines, 200,000 statues, 698 murals and 10,000 painted scrolls, as well as carpets, porcelain, jade, fine objects of gold and silver and a priceless collection of sutras and important historical documents. They also contain eight sacred gold stupas that are the tombs of eight Dalai Lamas.

Potala Palace, Lhasa. Burial place of five Dalai Lamas.

A stupa is a Tibetan Buddhist religious monument and a sacred burial site. Stupa burial is the most noble and sacred funeral ritual in Tibet and is reserved for the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama and other senior lamas. Upon their death the corpses were embalmed and dehydrated. Gold flakes and saffron were spread on the body which was then smeared with rare medicinal herbs and spices. Finally, the corpse was moved to the stupa and preserved for veneration. Stupas can be huge or small, elaborate or simple. The larger ones are built of stone or timber. The smaller ones can be of gold, silver or bronze. The size and style depends upon the ranking of the lama.

The West Chapel of the Potola houses an enormous central stupa, fifteen meters high, which is the last resting place of the 5th Dalai Lama (1642-82). It is built of sandalwood, clad in gold and studded with 18,680 pearls and semi-precious stones. The chapel also houses the funeral stupas of the 10th Dalai Lama (1826-37) and the 12th Dalai (1860-75). Nearby is another stupa, twenty-two meters high, containing the remains of the 13th Dalai Lama (1879-1933). The North Chapel of the Potala houses the gold stupa tomb of the 11th Dalai Lama (1842-56), who died as a child.

They're definitely closer to god.

Amongst the burial precincts that didn’t make it into my book Great Burial Places are sites where bodies are actually permanently disposed of above ground.

The best known are the hanging coffins attached to cliffs in Sichuan province in south-west China. They were placed there by the Bo people, an ethnic minority who died out about 400 years ago. Nobody knows why they disposed of their dead in this way. It could have been because they thought the gods would be able to reach them more easily. It could have been that the hanging coffins prevented bodies from being taken by animals. 

Each coffin is made from a hollowed out single tree trunk and was originally protected by a bronze cover. The coffins were placed on rock ledges or laid on horizontal poles that had been wedged into rock crevices. The most recent hanging coffins were made up to about 400 years ago in the middle and later periods of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), while many of the earliest ones date back 1,000 years. The hanging coffin was the most widespread form of burial in ancient southwest China but the practice ended with the sudden and mysterious disappearance of the Bo people.

Traditional burials in hanging coffins are also practised by the Igorot tribe of the northern Philippines, though they only take place every few years or so now. One of the most common beliefs behind this practice is that moving the bodies of the dead higher up brings them closer to their ancestral spirits. In addition, the Igorot fear being buried in the ground because they know water will eventually seep into the soil and they will rot. They want a place where their corpse will be safe. The coffins are either tied or nailed to the sides of cliffs. Most measure only about one metre in length as the corpses are buried in the foetal position.

The Igorots believe that you should depart this world the same way you entered it. A deceased person is first placed on a wooden chair, trussed up with rattan and vines and covered with a blanket. It is then positioned facing the main door of the house for relatives to pay their respects. The cadaver is smoked to prevent fast decomposition and as a means of concealing its smell during a vigil for the dead that lasts for a number of days. Before being taken for burial it is secured in the foetal position, wrapped in a blanket and tied with rattan rope while a team of men chips holes into the side of a cliff to hammer in the supports for the coffin.

Hanging coffins of the Igorot people, Philippines.

Hanging coffins of the Igorot people, Philippines.

Amongst the Toraja people of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, the funeral ritual is a most elaborate event and so expensive that the ceremony is often held weeks, months or years after the death so that the deceased's family can raise the funds needed to cover the cost. During the waiting period, the body of the departed is wrapped in several layers of cloth and kept under the house while its soul is thought to linger around the village until the funeral ceremony is completed. The body is then placed in a coffin containing any possessions needed in the afterlife and hung on a cliff or housed in a cave carved at huge expense into the side of a cliff. Some grave caves are large enough to accommodate the remains of a whole family.

A carved wooden effigy of the deceased, called a tau, is placed at the edge of the cave looking out over the land below. The coffin of a baby or child is usually hung from ropes against a cliff face or from a tree where it can remain for years until the ropes rot and the coffin falls to the ground.