The Ninth Sense: NanJing 2 - The Ming's Mausoleum (明孝陵)

Like I mentioned in the previous post, NanJing was the Capital for 6 Dynasties in history of China. Sadly, alot of these valuable historic site and relics were destroyed in years of war and changes in leadership. There are still a few important sites which are worth visiting. I did mentioned about Emperor Zhu-Yuan-Zhang in my previous post (Here). He gained power after defeating the Mongolian Empire and his competitors, then he built the capital city of Ming's Dynasty here in NanJing as the first emperor of Ming's Dynasty.

The old Ming's Palace was of course in ruin after all these years, but Emperor Zhu's Mausoleum is pretty much still well preserved. It is just located next to Dr. Sun-Yat-Sen's Mausoleum. In fact, the whole scenic area was collectively known as Zhong-Shan Scenic Area (钟山景区). Along side with the Mausoleum, there were alot of other scenic areas, which I will just skip as the main focus here would be Ming's Mausoleum!

So that day we finished touring Dr. Sun's Mausoleum, just a 10 minutes walk to reach Ming's Mausoleum.

Here is the ticket, quite expensive without the student rate~ Ha! Good to be a student~

Take a look at how vast is the area~

Here is the original look of the Mausoleum. In olden days, Emperor used to built their Mausoleum hidden for fear of being raided. In fact, there were no known emperor before the Ming's Dynasty who has a clear Mausoleum. Most of them just built it somewhere secluded and killed all involved engineers and workers.

However, Emperor Zhu was the first to built his Mausoleum openly with huge buildings on the ground. Hence, after him all other emperors of Ming and Qing's Dynasty started to built their Mausoleum this way. Zhu was a very arrogant man who thinks that his Empire will exist for eternal. Perhaps thats the reason he dared to built his Mausoleum on the ground.

Here we were infront of the first building. As you can see from the recovered drawing, there are a total of 3 buildings in Ming's Mausoleum. The first was the temple, second was Queen's palace and third one belongs to the King~

Here is the temple

As a sign of friendship towards the Chinese, the Manchurian Emperor built this after they conquered China and begun the reign of Qing's Dynasty.

The Queen's Palace

What was left were quite a ruin though~

Here was the path towards the King's Palace

Huge~~~

Although they built all these Mausoleum on the ground, the real underground palace was behind these buildings~ As for the opening to the underground palace, still a mystery~

Go all the way up~

Reached the top finally~

If I were not mistaken, this is the biggest King's Palace among all the Ming's Mausoleum. Perhaps as a sign of respect to the first emperor of Ming's Dynasty.

The Mausoleum of the rest of the emperor were located in Beijing~ Which I will introduce in my subsequent post~

Infront of the Mausoleum was this Heaven Path (神道) where there were alot of guardian statues and animals statue to safe guard the Mausoleum and the path to heaven. Their usual beliefs that they will rule in the other side of the world~

The animal path

All Sorts of animals~

The whole length of this heaven path was more than 2 km~

Just a 15 minutes walk away from the Mausoleum was this Plum flower garden. On this exact site was the old tomb of King Wu during the period of Three Kingdom.