王建墓

This guide to the tomb of Wang Jian in Chengdu starts with his stone effigy, carved with tired eyes and rough features far from an emperor's usual portrait. It traces his beginnings as a salt smuggler running with cattle butchers and thieves outside Xuchang, his arrest, and the jailer who reportedly let him slip out of the Xuchang jail rather than see him executed. From there it follows him to the Wudang Mountains, where a monk read something in his face, and into three decades of Tang-dynasty collapse that carried him into Sichuan.