Western Xia Imperial Tombs
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Chinese writers often call the site the "Pyramids of the East", a nickname earned by its tall, tapering earthen mounds rising from the plain.
- After 1949, local heritage officials at first took the mounds for a Tang dynasty cemetery; systematic excavation only began in 1972.
- Of all the burials, only two occupants are firmly identified: Mausoleum 7 belongs to Emperor Renzong, Li Renxiao, and Tomb 182 to the Tangut prince Weiming Anhui.
- The best-preserved mounds are octagonal and rise in seven stepped tiers, still pierced by rows of holes where timber rafters once projected.
- Some bricks from a stele pavilion at Mausoleum 3 carry single Chinese characters, often surnames such as Li or Niu, evidence that Han craftsmen helped build the tombs.
- Dozens of kilns stretching some 7 to 8 km along a nearby canal are thought to have been built solely to fire bricks, tiles and glazed ornaments for the cemetery.
- A walled settlement of nearly 100,000 square metres in the north of the site, probably a mausoleum town, yielded bright green glazed tiles and ridge beasts.
- The cemetery sits on a firm, well-drained gravel fan at the mountain foot, ground credited with helping the mounds survive several major earthquakes in the region.
- Tomb 161, about 165 by 100 metres, has been proposed as a joint tomb for two late emperors, which would make it the only burial breaking the south-to-north sequence.
- The site was first captured from the air in a photograph by the German aviator Wulf-Dieter Graf zu Castell, published in his 1938 book Chinaflug.
Why it is worth it
At the foot of the Helan Mountains, on the dry plain west of Yinchuan, a line of great earthen mounds rises from the steppe like weathered beehives. They are the tombs of the emperors of Western Xia, a state founded by the Tangut people that ruled much of northwest China from 1038 until its destruction by Genghis Khan's Mongols in 1227. The burial ground covers some 50 square kilometres and holds nine imperial mausoleums and around 250 tombs of relatives and officials, strung over about 12 km along the mountain foothills. In 2025 UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List as the Xixia Imperial Tombs.
The imperial mausoleums follow a common plan. A rectangular outer wall with paired gate towers on the south encloses stele pavilions, a barbican and an inner precinct with corner watchtowers. The tomb mound itself, made of rammed earth, stands off-centre in the north-west of the precinct and reaches up to 23 metres high and 30 metres across. Holes for timber beams and the quantities of roof tiles found around each mound show that these cores were once dressed as tiered towers with brick facing, tiled eaves and sculpture, a blend of mausoleum and temple with Buddhist features. The largest complexes, Mausoleums 1 and 2 at the southern end, have outer enclosures of 340 by 224 metres and are attributed to the grandfather and father of Li Yuanhao, the first emperor. Mausoleum 3, believed to be Li Yuanhao's own, is the most thoroughly studied.
Building moved northwards reign by reign, and the last three emperors have no mausoleums of their own, probably because the Mongols destroyed the state before they could be built. Excavations since the 1970s found the underground chambers looted, but they still yielded remarkable finds, among them a gilded bronze ox 1.2 metres long and weighing 188 kg, recovered from the passage of Tomb 101, and stele fragments in the intricate Tangut script. Early 20th-century explorers such as Pyotr Kozlov, Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin passed through the region without finding the site; the Tangut civilisation is still only partly understood, which makes these tombs one of its most important records.
Getting there
The tombs lie in Ningxia, about 40 km west of the old Western Xia capital, today's city of Yinchuan, and about 21 km from the town of Minning. The nearest airport is Yinchuan Hedong International Airport (INC), about 38 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Western Xia mausoleums include nine imperial mausoleums and about 250 tombs of imperial relatives and officials of the Western Xia dynasty. The burial complex occupies an area of some 50 km2 (19 sq mi) at the foot of the Helan Mountains some 40 km (25 mi) westward from the capital city of the Western Xia, Xingqing, what is modern-day Yinchuan, now capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwestern China.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
38.43503, 105.98717per Wikidata