Daereungwon Ancient Tomb Complex, Gyeongju

The mounds are the tombs of Silla's rulers from the fourth to sixth centuries, before Buddhism arrived and burial customs changed. Each is a wooden chamber buried under a cairn of river stones and then a hill of earth — a design that made them almost impossible to rob, which is why the gold came out intact. Cheonmachong, the one you can enter, was excavated in 1973 and yielded a gold crown, a gold cap, a gold belt and more than eleven thousand objects, among them a painting of a flying horse on birch bark that gave the tomb its name. Nobody knows whose it was. Hwangnamdaechong, the double mound next to it — 120 metres long, two tombs joined — held a king and, in the richer of the two chambers, a queen whose crown outranked his. The park was laid out in the 1970s by clearing the houses that had grown up between the mounds. The best view of it is not inside but from the small road along the west fence at dusk, when the shapes stand against the sky.

Original Text

Where it is

Region

Gyeongju, Gyeongbuk

Designation

Historic Site · 사적