The curious history of hanging coffins

The ancient funeral tradition of “hanging coffins” in southern China was carried out by ancestors of a minority ethnic group still living in the region today, a new study has found.

The report findings “provide valuable insights into the genetic, cultural, and historical roots of this burial custom”, say the authors of the study, published in the Nature Communications journal.

Auspicious and propitious

For millennia, inhabitants of modern-day Yunnan and Fujian provinces carried their dead high into the mountains and “pegged” wooden coffins into crevices in “exposed cliffs”, said Live Science. It is thought they used wooden scaffolding, rope pulleys or man-made trails to ascend the rocky cliffs.

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Hanging coffins are “considered auspicious”, wrote a Yuan dynasty chronicler some time between 1279 and 1368. “The higher they are, the more propitious they are for the dead.” Curiously, “those whose coffins fell to the ground were considered more fortunate”.

The new study examined 11 bodies dating back as far as 2,000 years ago and used genome sequencing to confirm them as ancestors of the Bo people, several thousand of whom are still living in Yunnan province. A branch of the ancient Tai-Kadai-speaking people, who occupied much of southern China before the Han ethnic group became dominant, they were nicknamed “Subjugators of the Sky” and “Sons of the Cliffs” in regional folklore.

Coffin culture

Other specimens gathered for the study suggest that the ancestors of the Bo people once inhabited much of the land that makes up modern-day Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. Genetic analysis of remains from hanging log coffins found at sites in Thailand suggests that the tradition “was spread by men who migrated from southern China into Southeast Asia”, said Phys.org.

But the practice of suspending remains in a cliff face can also be found in other cultures. Hanging coffins are also one of the burial customs of the Kankanaey people of Sagada, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The coffins are smaller than standard caskets, because the corpses are placed in a foetal position, due to a belief that people should leave the world in the same position as they entered it.

In Indonesia, shaped coffins known as erong, guarded by carved wooden representations of the dead, were placed in high caves and cliffside niches by the Toraja people until the 1960s.