Sections of a Coffin Platform

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.