Archaeologists in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province have announced four separate discoveries spanning more than a thousand years of Chinese history, from a Han Dynasty tomb holding rare gaming boards for the ancient game of Liubo to a joint burial belonging to a Northern Zhou official and his wife. The Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology announced the findings this week.
Artifacts unearthed from an archaeological site in Xi’an’s Xincheng District. Credit: Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.
A tomb of pottery figurines from the Sixteen Kingdoms period
The earliest of the newly detailed finds comes from Xi’an’s Xincheng district, where archaeologists carried out excavations between May and June 2023 as part of an urban redevelopment project. In the site’s northeastern section, they uncovered a tomb dating to the Sixteen Kingdoms period, spanning 304 to 439 AD.
Although the tomb had been disturbed at some point in the past, archaeologists still recovered 60 individual pieces or sets of burial objects, most of them pottery figurines. The assemblage falls into three broad categories, human figures, figures connected to travel and transportation, and depictions of domesticated animals, a combination the institute says matches elements commonly found in Sixteen Kingdoms-era tombs across the wider Guanzhong region.
Artifacts unearthed from Han dynasty tombs. Credit: Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.
Several of the horse figurines stood out for their preservation, retaining details of saddles, harnesses, and painted decoration intact, material researchers say offers valuable insight into horse equipment and ornamentation during the period. The tomb also held a substantial collection of female seated musicians, travel figures, and ceremonial guard figures, alongside animal and kitchen-related pieces, giving archaeologists a fuller picture of how figurine groups were composed and arranged in burials of this era.
Tang Dynasty tombs with Taoist imagery
A second discovery came from Xi’an’s Chang’an district, where excavations carried out between May and June 2022 at a construction site uncovered 11 ancient tombs. Two of them, designated M1 and M2, proved particularly well preserved, each containing epitaphs bearing clear dates, adding useful new evidence to the study of middle and late Tang Dynasty burials in the Xi’an area.
The epitaph recovered from tomb M2 turned out to be especially informative, offering fresh insight into marital relationships, family structure, and burial customs among couples during the Tang Dynasty’s middle and later periods. Researchers believe the tomb’s owner held a genuine familiarity with Taoist practice, based on several unusual figurines found within, including figures with tall hairstyles and large ears, alongside depictions of deer with curled horns, imagery the institute connects to Taoist belief and mythology, offering new material for studying religious symbolism in ancient China.
Liubo boards from a Han Dynasty tomb
The most eye-catching find came from a separate excavation at Shaanxi Normal University’s Chang’an campus, carried out in 2022 ahead of the construction of new student dormitories. Archaeologists cleared 25 tombs and two ash pits at the site, with 10 Han Dynasty tombs surviving in good enough condition for detailed study, yielding 130 sets of burial objects in total, including pottery, bronze, and iron artifacts.
One of two Liubo game boards carved into square bricks and discovered in Han dynasty tombs. Credit: Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.
Among these, two tombs, labeled M4 and M17, contained genuine highlights, boards for the ancient Chinese game of Liubo, carved directly onto plain or patterned bricks. Liubo, whose name literally means six sticks, was an enormously popular two-player board game during the Western Han Dynasty, played by both royalty and commoners alike, and is widely regarded as an ancestor of Xiangqi, or Chinese chess. Its board typically featured a distinctive symmetrical pattern, with a central area known as the water, and gameplay involved moving pieces according to throws of sticks or, later, dice. The game carried real cosmological weight in Han thought as well, with some scholars connecting its board pattern to contemporary diagrams of heaven and earth, and complete sets, including one remarkable, fully intact example recovered from the Mawangdui tombs in 1972, have turned up in aristocratic burials as apparent equipment for playing on into the afterlife. Despite that rich archaeological record, Liubo’s precise rules fell out of use and were effectively lost sometime after the Tang Dynasty, making each new board a small but genuine contribution to reconstructing how the game was actually played.
Beyond the chessboards themselves, the Shaanxi Normal University excavation offers researchers fresh material for tracing how burial objects, their types, quantities, and combinations, changed across the transition from the late Western Han into the late Eastern Han period.
A Northern Zhou official laid to rest with his wife
The fourth and final discovery came from a site east of Jinli village in the Xixian New Area, excavated between February and April 2021. According to an epitaph recovered at the site, the tomb belonged to a man named Yuwen Wei, who held several official positions during his life and died in the year 579, placing his burial firmly within the short-lived Northern Zhou Dynasty.
The tomb contained 115 sets of burial objects spanning pottery, porcelain, metal artifacts, and jewelry. Human remains recovered from the rear chamber confirmed the tomb functioned as a joint burial for Yuwen Wei and his wife, with female remains found on the eastern side of the coffin area and a relatively complete male skeleton on the western side, a layout matching the details recorded in the epitaph itself.
Among the tomb’s most notable objects was a white porcelain water container, notable for its distinctive shape, fine clay body, and delicate craftsmanship, a find the institute says offers valuable new evidence for tracing the development of white porcelain during the subsequent Sui Dynasty.
Source. Global Times (July 15, 2026), citing the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.