PRESERVING THE HANGING COFFINS OF THE BO PEOPLE

The Bo People were a minority tribe that once inhabited the border between today’s southern Sichuan and northwestern Yunnan province. The Bo disappeared during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty, persecuted to extinction through military expeditions mounted by the Central Court. Some remnants of the tribe are believed to have infiltrated into other local tribes and may have survived secretly until today.

How Man Wong first noticed the unique Hanging Coffins burial custom of the Bo in 1985 during his National Geographic Yangtze Expedition. These coffins perched on precipitous cliff-faces so fascinated him that he began amassing research material by previous scholars. Such studies started in the 1930s and continued into the 1980s. Much of the published work and internal research manuscripts are now within the CERS archive. CERS also visited the most famous of these Hanging Coffin sites in 1985, 1988 and several times in the 1990s.