Royal Tombs, Buyeo

Baekje moved its capital to Sabi, today's Buyeo, in 538 and ruled from there until Silla and Tang destroyed it in 660. Its kings were buried on this hillside outside the city's eastern wall: seven mounds, each a stone chamber with a corridor, low and grassed over. One, opened in 1917, has a chamber painted with the guardian animals of the four directions and a ceiling of lotus and cloud. The graves had been robbed long before anyone recorded them, and no king can be named to a mound. What made the site famous came from beside it. In 1993, excavating a temple foundation in the paddy field to the west, archaeologists found a gilt-bronze incense burner sixty-four centimetres tall — a lotus rising from a dragon, topped by a mountain of people, animals and musicians — buried in a workshop pit, apparently hidden as the kingdom fell. It is the finest object Baekje left, and the temple, it turned out, had been built by a princess in 567 for the soul of her father, the king. The burner is in the Buyeo National Museum in town. The temple site is an open field, and the tombs are a ten-minute walk of grass.

Original Text

Where it is

Region

Buyeo, Chungnam

Designation

Historic Site · 사적