Cheonmachong Tomb

In the middle of the city of Gyeongju lies a field full of round hills.

Not roughly round. Round as if someone had turned a giant bowl upside down on the ground and covered it with grass. The slopes are gentle, the grass is trimmed flat, smooth and green, and between the mounds stand rows of dark pine trees. Some mounds are low, and some rise well above the treetops. They do not sit out in open country. They stand right in the old part of town, only a few steps from restaurants and paved roads. Children walk past them to school every morning. Grown-ups walk past them on the way to market every afternoon.

And for generation after generation, nobody knew what was inside those hills.

People knew they were not natural hills. They were tombs. Gyeongju was once the capital of the kingdom of Silla, a kingdom that lasted nearly a thousand years, from 57 BC to the year 935. Kings, queens and nobles of Silla lie beneath these mounds. The city alone has more than 200 of them. A garden called Daereungwon holds 23 mounds, large and small, raised between the 4th and the 6th centuries.

The people of Silla planted pines around the tombs, because to them, a row of pines was a place from which to step up into the sky.

That much was known. What lay inside remained an open question.

The reason lies in the way Silla built its tombs, which was quite different from many other places. The builders did not carve out a stone chamber with a door. They set a wooden chamber into the ground and piled stones on top, layer upon layer. Clay was packed into the gaps between the stones so that rainwater could not seep down. Only then did they heap earth over everything and let the grass grow.

A tomb like that has no door to open. To get inside, you would have to take the whole hill apart. So for hundreds of years, nobody did. The grass stayed green, the pines kept growing, and the question lay quietly underneath. Only in the early 20th century were a few mounds opened, and most stayed as silent as ever.

Then came 1973.

Korean archaeologists wanted to excavate the largest mound in the garden, Hwangnamdaechong, whose base is 120 meters across. But no one had ever opened a Silla mound that large. There was no experience with a mound of that size, and whatever lay below could be lost forever through a single mistake.

So they changed their plan in a very sensible way. They would practice on a smaller mound first.

The mound they chose was numbered 155. It stood 12.7 meters high, with a base about 47 meters across. In that whole field of hills, it was only middling in size. A rehearsal, nothing more.

On April 16 of that year, the work began.

The team removed the earth layer by layer, and then the stones, working very slowly, measuring and recording every step. And that rehearsal turned up a number that even the people doing the work had not expected. Inside one middle-sized mound of earth lay 11,526 objects.

There was a gold crown, more intricately worked than any Silla crown found before it. There was a gold belt, and there was gold jewelry. There was a cup of blue glass, a very fragile thing. More than 140 of them were ranked as treasures.

There was also a whole store of gear for horses, more than 500 pieces.

But the thing that gave the tomb its name was not gold.

Among the horse gear was a mudguard. A mudguard is a flap that hangs on each side of the saddle, so the mud a horse kicks up does not splash the rider. This one was made of neither leather nor wood. It was made of birch bark, many thin pieces sewn in overlapping layers into one flat surface.

On that surface of bark there was a horse.

A white horse, galloping. Its mane streams backward, its tail flies up, and its tongue hangs out from the effort. Along its sides is something that looks like a pair of open wings. It does not stand, it does not walk, it does not stop anywhere. It flies.

The painting was put on the bark around the 5th or 6th century. So when the excavators lifted it from the ground, the horse had lain in darkness for about 1,500 years. Even so, the lines could still be read. The body of the horse still stood out white against the dark bark, and researchers later identified four different pigments in it.

It is one of the very few paintings from Silla times that survive today. It is called Cheonmado, the painting of the heavenly horse, the horse of the sky. One year after it was lifted out, it was named a national treasure.

And the tomb, which until then had only a number, was named after the painting: Cheonmachong.

The tomb does not carry the name of the person who lies inside. There was no stone tablet bearing a name, not one line of writing to say who this was. To this day, researchers have not been able to tell. This person had a gold crown, a gold belt, even a flying horse painted on bark for company, and yet the name is gone.

So in the end, the only name the tomb ever received was the name of a painting.

After that excavation, people knew what lay inside that middle-sized mound. This old quarter was later added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. The 23 mounds of the Daereungwon garden still stand where they always stood. Only one of them is open for visitors to step inside: the same mound, number 155. The others remain silent, green and round.

The objects brought up from it now rest in the national museum in Gyeongju itself. The birch bark itself is put on show only rarely, because it is so fragile. Anyone who gets to stand before it on one of those occasions notices something strange. The horse on it does not look like an antique at all.

All four legs stretch as far as they can go. Mane and tail fly backward as if a wind were blowing straight at it. The tongue hangs out in mid-stride.

Some craftsman painted it on a few thin layers of bark. Then the bark lay still beneath a grassy hill for 15 centuries. When light touched it for the first time after all those years, the white horse was still galloping, just as it had been the moment the painter set down the brush.