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.