Mo PaiArchive

Han tomb site · Changsha, Hunan, China

Mawangdui

The tombs that produced the oldest picture of the exercise tradition.

The T-shaped painted silk banner from Mawangdui tomb 1, showing heaven, the human world and the underworld in registers.
The T-shaped silk banner from Mawangdui tomb 1 — the best-known object from the site that also produced the Daoyin tu and the oldest surviving copies of the Daodejing. Huangdan2060 · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

Three Han tombs near Changsha, excavated in 1973 and 1974. Tomb 3, sealed in 168 BCE, produced silk copies of the Daodejing older than any then known, medical and divinatory manuscripts, a text on living by breath instead of grain — and the Daoyin tu, a painted chart of forty-four exercise postures.

It is the single most important archaeological site for this subject: the point at which the practices stop being claims in later texts and become physical objects with a sealing date on them.

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