4.2.2. Patrons of the Han Stone Reliefs

The materials for investigating the patrons of Han stone reliefs mainly come from archaeological excavations, which show that the tomb occupants and the tomb construction participants did not have a high social status.

First, inscribed texts from the Han tombs decorated with stone reliefs show that these are low-class burial sites. Yang Aiguo, an expert on Han stone reliefs, conducts a statistical analysis of the stone reliefs used as decorations for Han tombs, concluding:

The owner of the highest status among the Han stone tombs was a vassal king, and up till now among all excavated Han tombs there is only one such instance, which is the tomb of Liu Chong 劉 崇 (r. AD 120–124), King Qing of Chen of the Eastern Han dynasty. Liu Chong's tomb is of a very large scale, but there are not many stone reliefs inside the tomb, with most of them only being used at the entrance gate to the tomb. The original location of another stone relief fragment unearthed in the tomb cannot be determined. It can be seen that the stone reliefs were not the foremost body of the decoration of tombs of the princes and kings of the Han dynasty. The use of stone reliefs as tread stones for the toilet in the murals for the stone cliff-side tomb in Shiyuan, Yongcheng, Henan, may also be proof. (Yang 2006, p. 177)

Below is a table (Table 4) drawn on the basis of the statistical data provided by Aiguo Yang (2006, pp. 183–88).

**Table 4.** Statistics on the identity of occupants of Han tombs decorated with stone reliefs.


As shown above in the table, 90% of the tomb occupants were either junior-ranking officials or commoners, and commoners alone account for 60%, which strongly indicates that the occupants of the Han tombs decorated with stone reliefs basically belonged to the commoner class.

Second, the general lack of jade grave goods indicates that the Han tombs decorated with stone carvings were not of high class. Burial jade was widespread amongs<sup>t</sup> high-grade Han crypts. Burial jade is commonly seen in higher-class Han tombs, but is rarely found in Han tombs with pictorial stones. In addition, according to Lin Xu (2006, p. 138):

Up till now, among the unearthed 102 tombs of Han vassal kings, more than 1800 pieces of jade artifacts have been found. ... Among the unearthed jade artifacts, more than 1400 pieces have been unearthed from the tombs of highranking vassal kings (*houwang* 侯 王), accounting for 79% of the total. Another 380 pieces of jade were unearthed from the tombs of lower-ranking adjunct marquesses (*liehou* 列 侯), accounting for 21% of the total. (Xu 2006, p. 136)

No stone reliefs have been found in these elite Han tombs where many jade artifacts were unearthed. All the known archaeological evidence points to the fact that Han tombs with stone reliefs are generally not of high class. More such evidence comes from an Eastern Han tomb in Xingyuan 杏 園, Yanshi 偃 師, Henan Province. This is a high-class tomb decorated with murals, but the inner walls of the chamber were built inside the tomb chamber, about which there is an archaeological record, which reads:

The top arch is supported with two kinds of fan-shaped bricks. The four walls have two layers, inner and outer, and the outer layer is covered by 'one and a half bricks' (two horizontal bricks and one vertical brick in each layer). The walls are coated with 0.5 cm thick white plaster, and on the walls, images of carriage processions are drawn. The inner layer clings to the mural with strips of bricks. The top-down single-layer bricks are staggered and flat, stopping at a height of 2.2 m, enclosing the mural completely. Hence, the inner walls were undoubtedly added later. The reason behind it may have been that the content of the murals on the outer layer did not match the actual identity and official position of the tomb owner, so it was sealed. (Huang and Guo 1996, p. 169)

The inner walls of the tomb are more than 2 m high, completely concealing the outer mural that depicts the aristocratic life. This indicates that the occupant of the tomb attempted to cover up the fact that his social status was not high. Of course, the construction of tombs decorated with stone reliefs was relatively expensive, so their occupants/owners may have been wealthy commoners.
