The Chinese Pyramids of Xianyang

Stand still for a moment and feel the ground under your shoes. It is soft, pale, fine as flour. This is loess, the wind-blown yellow earth that covers much of northern China. Now lift your eyes. Out across the flat farmland, a shape rises that does not belong to nature. It has straight sides. It has a flat top. It is a hill that someone built by hand.

You are looking at one of the so-called Chinese pyramids. They are not stone like the pyramids of Egypt. They are mounds of earth, shaped with care into steep, four-sided forms with their tops cut flat. Scholars call this shape a truncated pyramid. Most of these mounds on the Xianyang plain are imperial tombs, and many of the largest belong to the emperors of the Western Han dynasty, who ruled China a little over two thousand years ago.

The Han matter a great deal in Chinese memory. Even today, the largest ethnic group in China calls itself the Han people, after this dynasty. Their capital, Chang'an, stood just south of here, near the modern city of Xi'an. The emperors chose the high ground north of the Wei River for their eternal homes. From this plateau, the dead could look down over the capital they once ruled. The river still runs through the valley below.

How do you build a mountain without stone? The answer is a technique called rammed earth. Workers poured loose soil into wooden frames, one thin layer at a time. Then they pounded each layer hard with heavy tools until it was dense and firm. Layer upon layer, the mound grew. On some eroded slopes, you can still see faint horizontal bands in the soil — the marks of those countless layers, packed by human hands.

Here is something many visitors do not expect. A Han emperor usually began building his tomb soon after he came to the throne. The project could run for his whole reign. So a long life meant a larger tomb. That is one reason the mound of Emperor Wu, known as Maoling, is the largest of the Western Han tombs. Emperor Wu reigned for more than fifty years, and his workers had decades to raise it higher.

Emperor Wu is one of the great figures of Chinese history. Under his rule, the Han pushed their borders far to the west and north. Envoys travelled into Central Asia, and these journeys helped open the routes that later became known as the Silk Road. So the quiet farmland around you has a link to trade that once reached all the way to the Mediterranean world.

Near Maoling stands the tomb of Huo Qubing, a young general who won famous victories against the Xiongnu, the nomadic peoples of the northern steppe. He died young, and the emperor honoured him with a tomb close to his own. Around it sit some of the oldest large stone sculptures in China. The best known shows a horse standing over a fallen warrior. The carving is simple and heavy. The sculptor kept much of the original boulder shape — and that roughness gives it great power.

For a closer look inside this world, many travellers visit Yangling, the tomb of Emperor Jing, not far from Xianyang's airport. Archaeologists have excavated pits around the mound and found thousands of small clay figures. They are much smaller than the famous Terracotta Warriors. And they have no arms. The arms were once made of wood and attached to the bodies. The figures were dressed in real silk clothing. Over two thousand years, the wood and silk decayed, leaving the clay bodies bare.

At Yangling, an underground museum lets you walk over glass floors above some of these pits. Below your feet lie rows of figures, animals, pots and tools, all placed to serve the emperor in the afterlife. It is a strange feeling — standing in the modern light while an ancient household waits quietly in the earth below. Many other tombs on this plain, including the main burial chambers, have never been fully opened.

The pyramids also have a second life, in modern legend. In the twentieth century, stories spread in the West about a giant white pyramid seen from the air over central China. According to one popular tale, a pilot spotted it during the Second World War. Later writers in the 1990s took up these stories and claimed the mounds were mysterious or even otherworldly. These are folklore and speculation, not history. Archaeologists understand these mounds clearly as Chinese imperial tombs.

Still, it is easy to see why the legends grew. From the air, or on a satellite map, the mounds look surprisingly geometric. They sit in lines across the plain, sharp-edged among the fields. Today the Xianyang plateau holds a great number of these earth mounds, large and small. Some belong to emperors, others to empresses, princes, and high officials who were allowed to rest close to their rulers.

Look around you at the modern landscape. Wheat and corn grow right up to the edges of some mounds. Trees cover the slopes of others. Farmers walk paths between them, and small villages sit in their shadows. For people who live here, these ancient tombs are simply part of the neighbourhood — familiar hills on the horizon, passed every day on the way to the fields or the market.

Before you leave, take one more look at the mound in front of you. Notice its flat top against the sky, and the clean slope of its sides, softened by two thousand years of wind and rain. Somewhere inside lies a person who once ruled millions. As you walk away, feel the fine yellow earth under your feet again. It is the same earth those workers pounded, layer by layer, long ago.