Baling Mausoleum

34.3167°N, 109.0667°E.

The Baling Mausoleum in eastern Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China — the tomb of Emperor Wen of Han (Liu Heng), the fifth emperor of the Western Han dynasty, who reigned from 180 to 157 BCE. Unlike every other Western Han imperial tomb, Baling has no rammed-earth pyramid mound: Emperor Wen — celebrated by the Confucian historians as one of the great frugal monarchs of Chinese history — ordered his tomb built into the side of Mount Bai (Bailu Yuan) without a constructed superstructure, with only earthen vessels rather than bronze grave goods, and with a simple unmounded entrance. The exact location of the burial chamber was lost by the early Tang and only definitively reidentified in 2021 by the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, who located it at the base of the mountain — earlier scholarship had wrongly placed it on the summit.

A pyramid that is not a pyramid, built into a mountain by the first Chinese emperor to refuse a constructed tomb mound, in a burial whose location was lost for fifteen hundred years and recovered in this decade.