Tomb of King Muryeong

The Tomb of King Muryeong is a royal grave on a low hillside at Songsan-ri 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.

King Muryeong ruled Baekje from 501 to 523. He restored the kingdom after a period of disaster, when Goguryeo had captured Baekje’s old capital near Seoul in 475 and several kings had been murdered. His son, King Seong, buried him here in 525, and the queen was laid beside him in 529.

The tomb is famous for three reasons. It was never robbed, so it gives a complete picture of a sixth-century royal burial. It contains inscribed stones that identify the king by name, which is extremely rare among ancient Korean tombs. And its bricks, coffins and grave goods show that Baekje was connected with southern China, Japan and even South-east Asia.

From outside, the tomb looks like a round earth mound. Beneath it, a sloping passage leads to a narrow entrance corridor and then to a rectangular burial chamber running north to south. Walls and roof are built of bricks, the roof curving over like a tunnel. Many bricks are stamped with lotus flowers, a Buddhist symbol of purity, arranged in repeating patterns.

In the walls are small niches shaped like arched windows, where lamps once burned. At the far end, raised brick platforms held the two wooden coffins, the king on the east side and the queen on the west. Under and around the coffins lay the objects the royal couple wore or took with them.

In the entrance passage stood a stone guardian beast, a sturdy four-legged creature with a single iron horn, facing outwards to keep evil away. In front of it were the two epitaph stones, and on top of them lay a string of Chinese bronze coins, as if paying for the land.

The most famous objects are pairs of gold crown ornaments, cut from thin sheets of gold into shapes that look like rising flames or plants, and hung with tiny gold discs that shimmered when the wearer moved. Museum analysis shows they were made of almost pure gold. They were probably attached to a cloth or silk cap.

The king wore gold earrings, a belt of gold and silver plaques and gilt-bronze shoes almost 40 centimetres long, too big and delicate for walking: they were made for the funeral. Beside him lay a sword whose ring-shaped pommel holds a dragon, a symbol of royal power. The queen had a silver bracelet engraved with the name of its maker, a craftsman called Dari, and a wooden headrest and footrest painted red and decorated with gold.

There were also bronze mirrors decorated with the animals of the four directions and Daoist immortals, Chinese celadon jars, lamps and many glass beads. The finds have been counted in different ways: the original count was about 4,600 objects, and the Gongju National Museum’s revised reports catalogue 5,232. 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”. It records that he died at the age of sixty-two in the gyemyo year (523), in the fifth month, and was laid in the great tomb in the eulsa year (525), in the eighth month.

Another inscription is a land-purchase contract (maejigwon). It states that, with ten thousand coins, the king bought the grave plot from the gods of the earth and the officials of the underworld. This was a Chinese funerary custom in which the dead were given a legal title to their grave, protecting them from spirits and later claimants. It is the only such contract known from a Three Kingdoms tomb. The queen’s epitaph, added when she was buried, records that she died in 526, that mourning was held for her in a western location, and that she was placed in the tomb in 529.

These texts do several things at once. They identify the tomb with certainty. They confirm and refine the dates in the Samguk sagi, which says Muryeong died in the fifth month of 523. They show that his personal name was Sama (斯麻), a name the Japanese chronicle Nihon shoki also gives as Shima. And they show that his Chinese title, granted by the Liang emperor in 521, was used even in the tomb, as part of how the king presented himself in death.

The gap between death and burial, about twenty-seven months for both king and queen, matches a Confucian three-year mourning period as counted in China. In 1996 archaeologists excavated a building complex at Jeongjisan in Gongju, west of the old palace area, that many scholars identify as the place where the royal bodies lay in state during this period.

Before the Ungjin period, Baekje’s royal tombs 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, some wedge-shaped for the vault, many with moulded lotus patterns, and laid them in alternating courses of flat and upright bricks. The barrel vault, the lamp niches and the arrangement of the platforms all have close parallels in brick tombs of the Six Dynasties, especially the Liang dynasty around Nanjing.

This did not happen by accident. Baekje sent envoys to Liang in 512 and 521, and the Liang history records that Muryeong informed the Liang court that Baekje had “again become a strong country”. It is likely that Baekje obtained brick-making knowledge, and perhaps craftsmen, through these contacts. Nearby Songsan-ri Tomb No. 6, another brick tomb of the same period, has wall paintings of the Four Guardian animals, a southern Chinese theme; a brick reported from it bears an inscription usually read as saying that it was made on the model of Liang official tiles.

Yet the tomb is not a simple copy. Its proportions, the colour patterns of the bricks and the way the lamps were placed show local choices, and the grave goods mix Chinese imports with objects made in Baekje style. Archaeologists therefore describe it as a Baekje adaptation of a southern Chinese model, created at a time when the court wanted to display its international connections.

Only a few brick tombs are known in Korea, all around Gongju, and after the move to Sabi in 538 the Baekje royal family returned to stone-chamber tombs, as seen at Neungsan-ri in Buyeo. 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, probably from kilns in the Yue or Hongzhou regions, as well as bronze coins of the Liang wuzhu type 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, presumably as a prestige gift or through exchange between the Baekje and Wa elites. Umbrella pine coffins have also been identified in other Baekje royal tombs, and archaeologists compare the tomb’s bronze vessels and burial customs with those of contemporary Japanese tombs such as Takaidayama in Osaka.

Scientific studies of glass beads from the tomb suggest that some glass came from South-east or South Asian sources, which may indicate indirect exchange with the maritime world around Funan and the Bay of Bengal. Such results are still being refined, but they show that a sixth-century Korean court sat at the edge of a trading world that reached the Indian Ocean.

The Nihon shoki adds a personal link: it says Muryeong was born on an island called Kakara in Tsukushi (northern Kyushu) while his family was travelling to Wa, and was therefore named Shima (“island”). 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.

The years in which the tomb was built and closed, 525 to 529, were busy ones across Eurasia. In Constantinople Justinian I became emperor in 527 and in 529 issued the first version of his Code, the start of the great compilation of Roman law later known as the Corpus Juris Civilis. In the same period, Benedict of Nursia is traditionally said to have founded the monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy (around 529), and the Sasanian empire under Kavad I was troubled by the Mazdakite movement before Khosrow I took the throne in 531.

In China, the Liang emperor Wu, whose court had given Muryeong his title, offered himself to the Tongtai temple for the first time in 527. In the kingdom of Silla, Muryeong’s eastern neighbour, the courtier Ichadon was martyred in 527 or 528, clearing the way for King Beopheung to accept Buddhism. In Japan, the Iwai rebellion broke out in northern Kyushu in 527, close to 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. 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 July 1971 workers were digging a drainage channel behind the mound of Tomb No. 6 to stop water seeping into it. On 5 July they struck the brick wall of a previously unknown tomb. The entrance was opened on 7 July, and news spread quickly.

Under pressure from crowds, journalists and officials, the excavation team decided to clear the chamber at once. Working through the night, they removed the contents in a very short time, far faster than modern standards would allow. Many small objects were collected in bulk, and the positions of many finds were not recorded precisely. The team leader, the archaeologist Kim Won-yong, later described the excavation as a serious mistake and a lesson for Korean archaeology.

Despite this, the finds transformed the study of Baekje. The excavation report appeared in 1973, and specialists have since restudied the objects, the textiles, the wood and the glass. Recent studies have tried to reconstruct the funeral step by step from the surviving records, photographs and objects.

The tomb was open to visitors for many years, but humidity, algae and visitors’ breath threatened the bricks, and in 1997 it was closed permanently. A full-scale replica in a nearby exhibition hall now allows visitors to see the interior.

Whose son was Muryeong? The Samguk sagi calls him the second son of King Dongseong. The Nihon shoki, citing a lost Baekje chronicle, makes him the son of King Gaero or of Gaero’s brother Gonji, which would make him Dongseong’s half-brother. The epitaph gives his age at death as sixty-two, which places his birth in 462 and fits the Nihon shoki’s chronology better than the Samguk sagi’s. Korean and Japanese historians continue to debate the genealogy, and the question matters because it affects how the troubled succession of the Ungjin period is understood.

Muryeong and Japan. The Nihon shoki story of his birth on Kakara island has been embraced in both countries, and a monument and festival mark the site in Saga Prefecture. In 2001 Emperor Akihito remarked that the mother of Emperor Kanmu (r. 781–806) was descended from King Muryeong, according to the Shoku Nihongi, and that he felt a kinship with Korea. Many Koreans welcomed this as recognition of Baekje’s role in Japanese history. Some Japanese commentators downplayed it, while historians in both countries stress that the statement refers to a documented genealogy of an eighth-century consort, not to the origins of the imperial line as a whole.

Imitation or creativity? Early scholarship often described the tomb as a straightforward copy of a Liang tomb, sometimes with the implication that Baekje culture was derivative. Korean scholars have emphasised instead the selective, local reworking of southern Chinese models, and archaeologists in Korea, China and Japan now tend to present the tomb as evidence of a shared East Asian elite culture in which each court combined imported and local forms. Similarly, the Japanese umbrella pine coffins have been read variously as tribute from Wa, as a gift within a Baekje-dominated exchange, or as trade between equals; the wood alone cannot decide between these views.

The ethics of 1971. The rushed excavation is now widely cited in Korean heritage education as an example of what not to do. It raises broader questions that are debated worldwide: how quickly archaeologists should excavate intact royal tombs, whether some should be left unopened, and how public and political pressure should be handled. Korea has since generally avoided opening other intact royal tombs such as the largest mounds in Gyeongju.

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 and ceramics, allow similar objects in undated tombs in Korea and Japan to be placed in time. Japanese archaeologists, for example, use comparisons with the Muryeong finds when dating Kofun-period tombs in the early sixth century.

The epitaphs are among the earliest dated Baekje texts and a source for Baekje’s use of Chinese titles, calendrical terms and funerary ideas. The directional chart on the back of the king’s stone, combining the heavenly stems, earthly branches and trigrams, shows knowledge of Chinese cosmology, and the phrase recording mourning in the “western” direction 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. The bodies themselves did not survive, so there are no human remains to study. 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.