Das Grab des Bin Wang: Wandmalereien der Ostlichen Han Zeit in China (review)

This slim yet beautifully produced volume is unusual and important in many ways. The result of a close archaeological cooperation between the Roman-Germanic Central Museum (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum) in Mainz and the Archaeological Institute of Shaanxi Province (Shaanxi Sheng Kaogu Yanjiusuo ), it presents the quite elaborate murals of an Eastern Han tomb, probably of a member of the nobility. The significance of the book and its publication is clear from the fact that so far, of the more than ten thousand tombs known from this period, only about fifty contain murals. This tomb, dating from the late second century C.E., belongs to the—otherwise unknown—Eastern Han Prince Bin and his wife and is located in the village of Baizi in Xunyi County, Shaanxi Province. (As is noted in the book, the title "Prince" might have been a self-assumed one.) The tomb was discovered by accident in October 2000 on the grounds of a brick factory when a bulldozer operator digging loess for bricks hit three subterranean vaulted tombs, one of them containing about fifty square meters of secco-painted murals.

The book is a fine publication, matching the significance of the archaeological site with high quality illustrations and archaeological documentation. It is bilingual (German and Chinese) throughout. The complete material was published first in the Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums 48 (2001), less than a year after the initial discovery of the tomb (and shortly after its destruc-tion), and now has been reissued in the present book, published on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Mainz museum. Such timely publication suggests a highly efficient collaboration between the various German and Chinese institutions and individuals involved. Altogether, the book shows us what international archaeological teamwork can achieve in China today, for the benefit of both the cultural relics and the scholarly community eager to study them. Since 1989, German archaeologists and curators from Mainz and Munich have been working in Xi'an together with their Chinese colleagues under an agreement between the German federal Ministry of Education and the Shaanxi provincial Ministry for Cultural Relicts (Shaanxi Sheng Wenwu Ju ); among their projects is the preservation of the famous Qin terracotta army from Xi'an.

It is because of this close and long-standing cooperation that German and Chinese archaeologists and curators were able to react quickly when adverse circumstances required, in a race against time, the salvaging and documentation of as much as possible of the remarkable murals in the tomb of Prince Bin. In a calm, matter-of-fact narration, the story is told in the introductory pages of the book and is worth a brief summary here. Once notified of the discovery of the tomb in October 2000, the Archaeological Institute of Shaanxi Province managed to arrange a halt of the loess digging at the site, which belonged to a privately owned brick factory. But when the archaeologists first arrived, the tomb had already been looted, and the factory owner was determined to destroy it completely in order to continue with his brick production. In November, archaeologists began photographing the murals. Three months later, some of the images captured on film—including the striking portrait of Prince Bin that graces the cover of the book—had already been destroyed in situ (see the Prince's sad image in illustration 28a).

Preliminary conservation by Chinese and German archaeologists began in January 2001. Finally, when the winter frost had eased, it was followed in April by the main work of documenting the murals and slicing them off the (ironically also brick) tomb walls. The factory owner had initially granted a period of four weeks to complete the work. After half of that period had...