Sections of a Coffin Platform

This richly ornamented stone construction is the long, front side of a coffin platform ultimately derived from raised wooden beds that are still popular in China today. Now in five pieces (presumably cut to facilitate transportation after it was excavated in the 1900s), the three legs and horizontal spans may have originally been created as a single massive slab. Sockets cut in the top of the stone (some of which overlap the modern divisions) show how this slab would have been linked to the back with crosspieces also capable of supporting a top surface of flat stone planks.

Like the few examples discovered intact in northern Chinese aristocratic tombs, the most elaborate decoration occurs on the front surface of the coffin platform. The design is dominated by the three large vertical panels, corresponding to the legs, that contain animated high-relief depictions of three directional guardians: the White Tiger of the West, the Red Bird of the South, and the Green Dragon of the East. These three, along with the Snake-Entwined Tortoise of the North and the Yellow Dragon of the Center, were mainstays of Chinese cosmology linked, in a system devised as early as the Han dynasty, to elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), functions, planets, and musical tones, among others. Not only illustrating the persistent appeal of these traditional apotropaic symbols, this scheme suggests that the platform was placed against the back, northern wall of a tomb that would have been entered from the south. The layered carving technique of these principal motifs as well as the shallow relief dragons, masks, and tendrils engraved in the horizontal spans recall forms found in both imperially sponsored tombs and cave chapels of the late sixth century.