A Silk Road saga: the sarcophagus of Yu Hong

Overview

Obviously, a lot of the stuff we know about the past comes from digging up the dead. There’s a bit of competition, sure, from pottery, monumental architecture and socks. But, for every Marcus Agrippa Made This there’s an uncanny road of tombs to point us towards history’s details. And, while the big hitters like the Egyptian pyramids or the tomb of China’s first Emperor get a lot of the attention, there’s a cavalcade of smaller tombs, tombstones and sarcophagi that are pretty marvellous to look at all in their own right. The Art Gallery of NSW is taking a few months to hop into the genre, in the form of a sixth century white marble sarcophagus, with A Silk Road saga: the sarcophagus of Yu Hong .

The exhibition will explode this intricately decorated super-size, coffin wrapper into its component panels, displaying more than a dozen other artefacts from the same tomb and the same era in Shanxi province (the same province where the First Emperor buried his terracotta army). And if this funeral atomisation really grabs you, there's also a sideline: a free A Silk Road Saga symposium being held on August 24.