The Coffin's Call from Wuxia Gorge's Coffin Mountain

The Wu Gorge Coffin Mountain: The River Coffin's Call

Deep in Wu Gorge lies a stream called the "Upstream Brook," whose waters flow uphill. The cliffs on either bank have no hanging coffins. Instead, coffins are sunk into the riverbed. This is the "river burial" devised by a branch of the Ba people known as the "Riverborn." They did not believe that "the higher the burial, the greater the filial piety." They did the opposite: the deeper the coffin sank, the closer it came to the water palace, and the better it could carry messages from the clan to the netherworld's "Ghost Kingdom" of Pingdu, now Fengdu. Over the millennia, the formation of coffins on the riverbed became a "living feng shui formation." Whenever fog rose at Kuimen, the river coffins shifted with the hidden currents and arranged themselves into a divinatory pattern.