Soaring coffins

Wooden coffins hanging on the rocks are a scary view. However, this method of burial is known since ancient times in China.
High in the mountains, among the rocks there are coffins – the only reminder of the mysterious and almost disappeared people who lived in the south-western part of modern China. Bo people had always remained an ethnic minority of the populous country. But, despite this, they managed to create a bright original culture, which would develop further if it was not bloody war with the Ming Dynasty.
What made people to have such a strange tradition? How did they lift coffins, weighing up to 200 kilograms, 100-200 meters high?

There are legends that Bo people were able to fly and air element was subservient to them. No one monument of culture left, except for the strange air burial.
It is worth noting that people in China are particularly sensitive to burial traditions and generally everything related to the dead.

Scientists have noticed that most of the graves are found in ravines, where mountain rivers flow. So, they hypothesized the Bo people waited spring floods, and raised water helped them. But there is another version according to which the rock climbers hammered wooden wedges and climbed on them as if on a makeshift ladder. The probability of this assumption is confirmed by the holes, found in some rocks. And recently in the archives of a library, located in southern China, the researchers found a description of another very plausible way of lifting a rock tomb – with the help of ropes.
According to some experts, Bo believed, that soul went to heaven and put up coffins as high as possible in order to ease the soul the way up. Others think, they lift coffins on the cliff so that enemies could not desecrate the dead body.
Incidentally, modern scientists have found that the “freshest” coffins were set on the cliffs along the Yangtze River only 400 years ago. The age of the oldest is thousand years. But the most ancient tomb is 2,5 thousand years old!
Today, the rock tombs are the cultural monuments. Restoration work was in 1974, 1985 and 2002.

Hanging cemeteries are in some other Asian countries, such as Indonesia and the Philippines. Filipinos hung coffins on a rock. Scientists have found a cave full of coffins in Sagada. Experts say that the age of the oldest sagadanskogo is about 2000 years, and the youngest – 20 years.
Tana Toraja is the third largest island of Indonesia. And it is known for its unique funeral rites. Many centuries ago, the locals constructed coffins in the form of boats and animals and left them at the foot of the cliffs. But over time, descendants indifferent to the past began to plunder graves. The bodies of the dead were put up in the mountains.

Soaring coffins