Shunzhi’s Sealed Tomb: A 23-Year-Old Emperor, a Lost Empress, and a Hidden Palace | Xiaoling EP3

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Xiaoling series. Today, we are stepping inside the unseen structure of the Shunzhi Emperor's tomb and uncovering the heartbreaking love story that destroyed his life of a 23-year-old ruler of China. The Xiaoling Mausoleum is sealed to the public. No visitor can enter either the underground palace or even the main sacrificial prince's cage. But using surviving Qing records, architectural rules of the imperial tomb system, and collaborations with other royal mausoleums of the same era, we can reconstruct what lies beneath this mound and how the emperor's final resting place was designed. For a short time in the early years of the People's Republic of China, this tomb was actually opened as a tourist site. That brave experiment is why you can still see modern railings and turnstiles standing unworkedly in front of the Long'an Gate, the Gate of Imperial Grace, that leads into the main sacrificial courtyard of the mausoleum. From ground level, the Long'an Hall is almost completely hidden behind the locked gate. In Qing times, the two low hills on either side of the hall were seen as more than just a landscape, they were protective arms in the feng shui of the tomb, blocking bad winds and bad fortune, and guarding the prosperity of the emperor's descendants. Today, we follow that same line of the hills and climb up one of the slopes. From here, our journey leaves off revealing the full axis of the Xiaoling Mausoleum for the first time. At the center of the axis is the Long'an Hall, the main ritual hall of the Xiaoling Mausoleum. Its double-eved roof is covered in yellow glazed tiles, the second-highest rank in the whole system of imperial architecture in China. Shunzhi died in 1661, and by 1664, his mausoleum was already finished, an imperial construction project completed in barely three years. To make that possible, the Qing court recycled huge beams, pillars, and decorations taken from dismantled Ming palaces in what is now Beihai Park in Beijing. Four times a year, this hall hosted the major state rituals for the tomb, at Qingming in spring, at the Zhongyuan Ghost Festival in the seventh lunar month, at the winter solstice, and during the lunar new year season. On top of that, smaller offerings were made almost every month. For the Qing court, this building was a fixed bridge between a living dynasty and the dead Emperor Beneath the Hill. To see this more clearly, we need to step inside the hall itself. We can't film inside Shunzhi Emperor's own Long'an Hall today. So what you are seeing here is the Long'an Hall of the Kangxi Emperor's Tomb, a later Qing mausoleum built to the same basic design. At the very center of the hall stands a raised inner chamber called the Nuange, the Womb Chamber. On its main altar stood the spirit tablet of the Shunzhi Emperor and his first Empress, Empress Xiao Kangzhang. Her family name was Tong, a Han-Banna-Man family from the northeast, and she was the mother of the future Kangxi Emperor. Later legend says that when she was pregnant, Shunzhi's mother, Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, saw a golden dragon crawling around her in a dream and declared that she would give birth to the next son of heaven. Empress Xiao Kangzhang herself died not long after Shunzhi, and her ashes were buried together with his in the underground palace behind this hall. But not every woman in his life was given a place at the center. On the western side of this Womb Chamber, though, stood a single lonely spirit tablet. It belonged to Empress Xiaoxian of the Dong'e clan, the daughter of a powerful Manchu noble. Later accounts say she was fluent in both Manchu and Chinese, and skilled in the elegant arts of the Han literature. Shunzhi loved her almost to the point of oblivion. When she gave him a son, he nearly named the child heir to the throne. But the boy lived for only 104 days before dying. Dong'e fell ill soon after and never recovered. In Qing Dynasty chronicles and later traditions alike, the young emperor is described as collapsing into grief, even speaking of giving up the throne and becoming a Buddhist monk after her death. For his mother, Empress Xiaozhuang, this was unthinkable. In the end, Dong'e's spirit tablet was not allowed to stand beside Shunzhi and Empress Xiaokangzhang at the center of the hall. It was pushed off to the west side. She was excluded from the four great annual sacrifices, allowed only the smaller monthly rites. So even here, in the hall built to bend the living corpse to its dead, the woman he loved most was kept at a distance. Not long after Dong'e passed away in 1661, the grief-stricken Shunzhi emperor caught smallpox and soon after followed her to the grave. Stepping out from the Long'en hall and walking to its rear, we reach the formal entrance to the burial prince's cage itself. Here stands a three-arched glazed tile gate, its surface covered in brightly colored reliefs. In front of it runs a narrow bending stream, a kind of jet-built river laid out at the foot of the tomb. For the peoples of the northern frontier, who followed rivers and pastures in a world of hunting and herding, water means life and movement. By the Qing period, the Chinese in the central plains increasingly believed that flowing water could also bring wealth and good fortune. This little man-made stream in front of Shunzhi's tomb is a trace of such long interaction between northern steppe cultures and the central plains. Beyond the glazed gate rises a square walled terrace with a gatehouse tower on top, the defensive platform that crowns the tomb. From a distance, it looks like an elegant two-story pavilion, but its design comes straight from fortress architecture. In the Ming Dynasty, at the Mingxiaoling Tomb in Nanjing, this kind of stone stronghold was first built above the underground palace to guard against bandits. Later, every Ming and Qing imperial mausoleum copied the same pattern. Beneath this fortress on a mound lie the underground chambers where Shunzhi and his two empresses were finally buried together. From the joint's eye, you can see that Shunzhi Emperor's burial mound or tumulus is surprisingly small. Compared with the great round mounds of the Ming tombs, or with the much larger hill over Kangxi's own mausoleum, this one is a modest oval rather than a grand circle. That change in shape and scale points to something hidden below. At Xiaoling, the underground palace was built on a much more compact plan than most other imperial tombs. Because all three of the people buried here died so young and so suddenly, their burial followed a different pattern from many other emperors. According to Qing records, Shunzhi and his two empresses were cremated according to an older Manchu customer, a practice that went back to the Manchu world before they entered central China in the 17th century. Their remains were placed in three-funeral urns rather than full-sized coffins. We don't yet know exactly how Shunzhi's cremation urn was housed inside the underground palace. Based on early Manchu cremation customs and on findings from some excavated Qing princely tombs where stone cases were used, it is quite possible that the urn was placed inside a protective stone container, perhaps something like a small horse-shaped stack of fogas standing where a full coffin would normally have been. An underground palace built to hold urns did not need the vast high-voltage chambers of earlier tombs, so also Xiaolin still followed the usual pattern of a front, middle, and rear hall joined by corridors. Each of those halls was built on a much smaller scale, and the mound above shrank with it. So how was this underground palace actually made? First, builders dug a vast pitch into the hillside where we now see the mound. Inside that pitch, they stacked and locked together huge stone blocks, forming the walls, flowers, and vaulted ceilings of the three linked chambers below. Only after the entire stone structure was complete did they backfill the pitch and raise the earthen mound on top. Seen from a plan wheel, the underground palace mirrors a mini-nature, three-half-palace complex, like a hidden stone replica of the buildings that once stood above. For centuries, that stone palace stayed sealed and untouched. In the late 1914s, on the eve of the founding of the People's Republic of China, a band of grave robbers tried to break into this underground palace. They began digging down, hoping to strike the stone vault, but the entrance passages were too well hidden inside the hill. After digging for a long time, without finding a way in, they were discovered by local militia and driven off. Their failure is one of the reasons why, among all the imperial tombs in the Eastern Qing Tomb Complex, Shunzhi's Xiaolin Mausoleum remains the only one that has never been opened or looted. There was another reason Xiaolin drew less attention from grave robbers. Inside the Great Stela Pavilion, on the spirit way of this mausoleum, an inscription recalls the Kangxi Emperor, Shunzhi Emperor's son, repeating his father's dying wish that no great treasures were to be buried in the underground palace. Combined with the Manchu style cremation and the use of simple funeral urns, this meant there was far less gold, jade, and jewelry here than in many other imperial tombs. For professional tomb raiders, Xiaolin simply did not look worth the effort. In 1661, at just 23 years old, the Shunzhi Emperor died of smallpox in the Forbidden City. For a brief moment, every major faction in China such history might be a bore to turn back. Ming loyalists, powerful Manchu generals, and high officials all watched the throne, hoping the crisis would reopen the old order. But into this vacuum stepped his mother, Empress Dowager Xin Wuzhuang, a tough, highly skilled political operator. She pushed her six-year-old grandson Anxin Juelu Xuanye onto the throne, the boy who would become the Kangxi Emperor, or Kangxi the Great, and held the empire together long enough for him to grow into one of China's most formidable rulers. Under Kangxi, and later under his grandson Qianlong, this dynasty could create what was called the Last Great Golden Age of the Chinese Empire. Meanwhile, in Europe, Annie of Austria, a Habsburg queen mother, ruled as regent and helped her young son Louis XIV through a time of crisis, paving the way for the Golden Age he would later create. On opposite ends of Eurasia, two senior royal women were quietly shaping history from behind the throne. In our next episode, we will leave Shunzhi's Xiaolin and travel east to the Zhaoxi mausoleum of Empress Dowager Xin Wuzhuang, a Mongol princess from the Khorchin steppe, a formidable regent in the Forbidden City, and the woman who changed the course of Qing history in the storm after her son's death. If the story of Shunzhi's short life and silent tomb spoke to you, please like the video and subscribe. Come with me to the next mausoleum.