Tomb of King Muryeong

The Tomb of King Muryeong is a royal grave on a low hillside at Songsan-ri (now Geumseong-dong) in Gongju, a city in the west-central part of South Korea. In the early sixth century Gongju was called Ungjin and was the capital of Baekje, one of the three kingdoms of ancient Korea. The tomb belongs to a group of royal tombs now officially called the Tomb of King Muryeong and the Royal Tombs of Gongju; in the older numbering it is Songsan-ri Tomb No. 7.

King Muryeong ruled Baekje from 501 to 523. He came to the throne after a period of disaster: in 475 Goguryeo had captured Baekje’s old capital near present-day Seoul and killed King Gaero, and two later kings, Munju and Dongseong, were assassinated. Muryeong restored the kingdom’s strength, and in 525, in the reign of his son King Seong, he was laid in this tomb; the queen was laid beside him in 529.

The tomb is famous for three reasons. It was never robbed, so it gives an unusually complete picture of a sixth-century royal burial. It contains inscribed stones that name the king, which makes it the only royal tomb of the Three Kingdoms period whose occupant and date are known for certain. And its bricks, coffins and grave goods show that Baekje was connected with southern China, Japan and, more indirectly, South-east Asia.

From outside, the tomb looks like a round earth mound about 20 metres across. Beneath it, a sloping approach leads to a narrow entrance corridor and then to a rectangular burial chamber running north to south, about 4.2 metres long, 2.7 metres wide and 2.9 metres high. Walls and roof are built of bricks, the roof curving over like a tunnel. Many bricks are decorated with lotus flowers, a Buddhist symbol of purity, or with lattice patterns, arranged according to their position.

In the north wall and in each side wall are small niches shaped like jewels, painted with flames, where lamps once stood. At the far end a raised brick platform held the two wooden coffins, the king on the east side and the queen on the west. Under the collapsed coffin boards lay the ornaments the royal couple wore and objects placed with them.

In the entrance corridor stood a stone guardian beast, a sturdy four-legged creature with a single iron horn and wing-like flames on its sides, facing south to keep evil away. In front of it lay the two epitaph stones, and on them a bundle of Chinese wuzhu coins, as if paying for the land.

The most famous objects are two pairs of gold crown ornaments. The king’s were cut from thin sheets of gold into shapes like rising flames and hung with tiny gold discs that shimmered when the wearer moved; the queen’s, without discs, centre on a lotus rising from a vase. Analysis by the Gongju National Museum found the king’s ornaments to be 98–99.1 per cent gold. They were attached to a cap, matching the Samguk sagi’s description of Baekje kings wearing a black silk cap decorated with gold flowers.

The king wore gold earrings, a belt of gold and silver plaques, and gilt-bronze shoes 38 centimetres long, made for burial rather than for walking. Beside him lay a long sword whose ring-shaped pommel holds a dragon’s head, a symbol of royal power. The queen had a pair of silver bracelets, both bearing the same inscription dated to the second lunar month of 520 (gyeongja year) and naming their maker, a craftsman called Dari (多利); and both king and queen had wooden headrests and footrests, the queen’s painted red with cinnabar and decorated with gold.

There were also bronze mirrors decorated with the Four Guardian animals, other creatures and inscriptions about Daoist immortals, Chinese celadon jars, lamps and many thousands of beads. The finds have been counted in different ways: the museum and older reports give about 4,600 objects of 108 types, while a recent study counts about 5,200. They are now displayed in the Gongju National Museum.

The two stones, each about 35 by 41 centimetres, are written in Chinese characters in an elegant hand that shows southern Chinese calligraphic influence. The king’s stone begins with his Chinese title, “Great General Who Pacifies the East” (寧東大將軍), followed by “Sama, King of Baekje” (百濟斯麻王). It records that he died at the age of sixty-two on the seventh day of the fifth lunar month of the gyemyo year (523), and was laid in the “great tomb” on the twelfth day of the eighth lunar month of the eulsa year (525). Its back carries a directional chart made of heavenly stems and earthly branches.

The second stone carries, on its back, a land-purchase contract (maejigwon). Dated to the same day, the twelfth day of the eighth lunar month of 525, it states that the king, with ten thousand coins, bought the grave plot in the sin (申, west-southwest) direction from the earth king, the earth lord, the earth parents and the officials of the underworld; it ends with the formula 不從律令, whose meaning is disputed. Buying the grave from the gods of the earth was a Chinese funerary custom with Daoist overtones, and this is the only such contract found in a Three Kingdoms royal tomb. The queen’s epitaph, carved on the front of the same stone, records that she died in the eleventh lunar month of 526 (some early readings have the twelfth), that her mourning was held at a place in the west (酉地), and that she was moved to the great tomb on the twelfth day of the second lunar month of 529.

These texts do several things at once. They identify the tomb with certainty. They agree with the Samguk sagi, which says Muryeong died in the fifth month of 523, and refine it to the day. They show that his personal name was Sama (斯麻). The Samguk sagi writes the name 斯摩; the passage of the Baekje sinchan quoted in the Nihon shoki has 斯麻王 (King Sama), while the Nihon shoki’s own narrative calls him 嶋王 (Shima, “island king”). And the epitaph shows that the Chinese title granted by the Liang emperor in 521 was used even inside the tomb, as part of how the king presented himself in death.

The gap between death and burial, about twenty-seven months for the king, is usually explained as Confucian three-year mourning, which in Chinese practice lasted about twenty-seven months. In 1996 the Gongju National Museum excavated an unusual walled complex of buildings at Jeongjisan, on the same hill as the royal tombs. Because its direction from the presumed palace matches the “west” of the queen’s epitaph, and because its finds look ritual, it has been interpreted as the temporary mortuary where royal bodies lay in state, though its exact function still needs study.

Before the Ungjin period, Baekje’s royal tombs near Seoul were stepped stone mounds or stone-chamber tombs. Muryeong’s tomb uses a completely different technique. Its builders made thousands of fired bricks in several shapes, many with moulded lotus patterns, and laid them in repeated courses of flat and upright bricks. The barrel vault, the lamp niches and the window-like slots all have close parallels in brick tombs of the Six Dynasties, especially those of the Liang elite around Nanjing.

This did not happen by accident. Baekje sent envoys to Liang in 512 and 521. According to the Liang history, in 521 Muryeong’s memorial claimed that Baekje had “repeatedly defeated Goguryeo”, and the history adds that Baekje “again became a strong country”; that year the Liang emperor gave him the title Great General Who Pacifies the East. It is likely that Baekje obtained brick-making knowledge, and perhaps craftsmen, through these contacts. One brick from the tomb is inscribed “made in the imjin (壬辰) year”, usually taken as 512, and the neighbouring brick tomb, Songsan-ri No. 6, which has wall paintings of the Four Guardian animals, yielded a brick incised with a phrase usually read as “Liang official tiles were taken as the model” (梁官瓦爲師矣).

Yet the tomb was built with local materials and some local choices. Bricks identical to those of the Gongju tombs have been found at the Jeongdong-ri kiln site in Buyeo, so they were made in Baekje, and the bricklaying pattern, four flat courses to one upright course, differs from the three-to-one pattern common in China. Archaeologists therefore describe the tomb both as a close adoption of a Liang elite tomb type and as evidence of Baekje’s own production.

Among the Three Kingdoms, brick-chamber tombs of this southern Chinese type are known only from Baekje and only in the Gongju area (the earlier brick tombs around Pyongyang belong to the Chinese Lelang commandery). The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture notes that their barrel vaults also influenced later Baekje stone-chamber tombs. The brick tombs of Gongju thus mark a short, intense moment of southern Chinese influence.

The grave goods map Baekje’s connections. From southern China came celadon vessels, which specialists attribute to kilns such as those of Yuezhou or Hongzhou, as well as the bundle of wuzhu coins, identified as iron coins, laid on the epitaph stones, and perhaps some of the bronze mirrors. The epitaphs and land contract themselves follow Chinese funerary forms.

The coffins were made of Japanese umbrella pine (koyamaki, Sciadopitys verticillata), a tree that grows naturally only in Japan. The wood must have been shipped across the Korea Strait. Coffins of the same wood have also been identified in the royal tombs at Neungsan-ri (the so-called Donghachong) in Buyeo and at Ssangneung in Iksan, so the Baekje royal family seems to have favoured it; how the wood reached Baekje, and why, remain open questions. Japanese finds show the link from the other side: a bronze long-handled iron from the Takaidayama tomb in Osaka is almost identical to one from Muryeong’s tomb, and a bronze mirror like the king’s was found in the Kannonyama tomb in Gunma.

The tomb also held thousands of beads of glass, amber, agate and other materials. Analyses suggest that most of the glass beads were imported, and South-east Asia has been proposed as one source, which some researchers link with exchange reaching Funan in the Mekong region. These results are still debated, but they suggest that a sixth-century Korean court sat at the edge of a trading world that reached into South-east Asia.

The Nihon shoki adds a personal link. It says that in 461 a pregnant consort of King Gaero, sent to Wa with the king’s brother Gonji, gave birth on an island called Kakara in Tsukushi (northern Kyushu), and that the child, named Shima (“island”), became King Muryeong. Historians treat this story cautiously, but the tomb’s Japanese coffin wood gives material form to the close relations between Baekje and Wa in his time.

Between the king’s burial in 525 and the queen’s in 529, much was happening across Eurasia. In Constantinople Justinian I became co-emperor in April 527 and sole ruler later that year, and in 529 he promulgated the first version of his Code, the first product of the great compilation of Roman law later known as the Corpus Juris Civilis.

In China, the Liang emperor Wu, whose court had given Muryeong his title, withdrew from the world into a Buddhist monastery for the first time in 527. In the kingdom of Silla, Muryeong’s eastern neighbour, the courtier Ichadon was martyred in 527 or 528 (sources differ), clearing the way for King Beopheung to accept Buddhism. In Japan, the Iwai rebellion broke out in Tsukushi in northern Kyushu in 527, not far from the island where the Nihon shoki says Muryeong was born.

The tomb’s Chinese-style brickwork and its coffins of Japanese umbrella pine are direct evidence of the Baekje court’s place in an East Asian network of envoys, craftsmen and trade. About a century later in eastern England, the ship burial at Sutton Hoo shows another royal family using imported treasures to display status in death; the two burials had no connection, but comparing them shows how rulers far apart turned foreign goods and styles into signs of power.

The discovery was an accident. In the summer of 1971 workers were digging a drainage channel north of the mound of Tomb No. 6 to stop rainwater seeping into it. On 5 July a worker’s shovel struck carefully stacked bricks: the vault of a previously unknown tomb, which earlier investigators had taken for part of Tomb No. 6’s mound. That mistake is one reason it escaped looting.

An excavation team from the Bureau of Cultural Property and the National Museum of Korea, led by the museum’s director Kim Won-yong, arrived on 7 July; heavy rain halted work that night, and the sealing bricks of the entrance were removed on the afternoon of 8 July. When the team announced that the epitaph named King Sama of Baekje, crowds, journalists and officials pressed into the site. The team decided to clear the chamber at once: working through the night, it removed the contents within about twelve hours, where a properly organised excavation would have taken months. Only easily visible objects were drawn in place, and the remaining small finds on the floor were shovelled into sacks with the plant roots.

Despite this, the finds transformed the study of Baekje. The excavation report appeared in 1973, and the Gongju National Museum has since restudied the objects, the textiles, the wood and the glass, publishing new reports from 2009 onward. Recent studies have tried to reconstruct the funeral step by step from the surviving records, photographs and objects.

After the excavation, rainwater seepage and the changed environment damaged the tomb: a 1996–97 survey found humidity close to 100 per cent inside, algae on the walls, and broken bricks up from 435 in 1972 to 1,072 in 1996. The real tomb is now closed to visitors, and a full-scale replica in a nearby exhibition hall shows the interior.

Whose son was Muryeong? The Samguk sagi calls him the second son of King Dongseong. The Nihon shoki gives two other versions: quoting the lost Baekje chronicle Baekje sinchan, it makes him a son of Prince Gonji and an elder half-brother of Dongseong, while its own narrative and an editorial note make him a son of King Gaero. The epitaph gives his age at death as sixty-two, which places his birth in 461 or 462; together with Dongseong’s reportedly young accession in 479, this makes a father–son relationship hard to reconcile. The annotators of the National Institute of Korean History’s edition of the Samguk sagi therefore favour the Gonji version, but the genealogy is still debated, and the question matters because it affects how the troubled succession of the Ungjin period is understood.

Muryeong and Japan. At his birthday press conference on 18 December 2001, Emperor Akihito said that he felt a connection with Korea because the Shoku Nihongi records that the mother of Emperor Kanmu (r. 781–806) was a descendant of King Muryeong. It refers to the recorded ancestry of one eighth-century emperor’s mother, not to the origins of the imperial line as a whole.

How Chinese is the tomb? The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes it as closely following the form of Liang elite tombs, and Kwon Ohyoung notes that Korean scholars long found its Chinese architecture hard to place until comparative studies with Six Dynasties tombs confirmed the link. Other researchers stress the Baekje-made bricks, the different bricklaying and the mix of imported and local grave goods. Much of the comparative work has been done by Chinese and Japanese scholars, and the tomb is increasingly studied as evidence of an elite culture shared, and adapted, by several East Asian courts.

The ethics of 1971. Even sympathetic accounts admit that the excavation process was problematic, while pointing to the political pressures of the time and the limited experience and resources of Korean archaeology; the National Archives of Korea describes the work as falling far short of the discovery’s importance. Kang Wonpyo argues that the experience of the Muryeong excavation brought about key developments in Korean archaeology and heritage policy. It raises broader questions debated worldwide: how quickly archaeologists should excavate intact royal tombs, and how public and political pressure should be handled.

Because the tomb is dated precisely, it has become a chronological anchor for East Asian archaeology. Objects found in it, such as its crown ornaments, earrings, swords, mirrors and bronze vessels, are compared with similar objects in undated tombs in Korea and Japan. In Japan this has fed a lively debate: the Takaidayama tomb in Osaka, conventionally dated earlier than Muryeong’s burial, contains a bronze iron almost identical to his, which some scholars take as a sign that the standard sueki pottery chronology needs adjusting.

The epitaphs are key dated documents of Baekje and a source for its use of Chinese titles, calendrical terms and funerary ideas. The directional chart on the back of the king’s stone, made of heavenly stems and earthly branches, shows knowledge of Chinese cosmology, and the phrase recording mourning in the “west” has been used to locate the temporary mortuary at Jeongjisan.

At the same time, the tomb cannot tell us everything. The haste of 1971 means that the original placement of many items is uncertain; debates about which objects belonged to the king and which to the queen, or what was placed in 525 and what in 529, depend partly on photographs and memories. Historians must combine the tomb with the written record of the Samguk sagi, the Liang history and the Nihon shoki, while remembering that each of those texts had its own purposes.