Tomb made from porcelain bowls unearthed in China

Yesterday the archaeology department of China's Chongqing Municipality announced a remarkable discovery: a Qing Dynasty tomb of an almost unique style, made out of more than 2,000 qing hua ci (blue and white porcelain) bowls.

The Chongqing Economic Times quoted archaeologists as saying that this kind of tomb is very rare and had probably been constructed by migrants to the area.

The tomb was discovered on the morning of August 24, the final day of the Beijing Olympics, by a team of road workers in E’Ling Street, in the Yuzhong district of Chongqing. When the first bowl was dug out, the workers thought nothing of it and discarded it, but as more bowls emerged, they realized they had discovered something unusual and called the city’s cultural relics administration.

The archaeology department sent a team to investigate. They discovered a tomb constructed from porcelain bowls. Lying just 60 centimeters under the road surface, the bowls had been piled together to form a tomb. The coffin and other funerary objects were then placed inside.