Kitora Mounded Tomb

This guide to Kitora Mounded Tomb in Nara opens with grave robbers in the Kamakura period, punching a hole through the sealing stone to tear apart a lacquered coffin and grab gilded fittings and swords, leaving wood, bone and grave goods scattered across the chamber floor. It follows what those thieves never noticed above their heads in the dark, a painted stone ceiling watched over by the four guardian gods of the compass points, and traces the anxious 1998 rediscovery of that ceiling inside a chamber sitting near one hundred percent humidity. Stand back from the mound itself, since what remains inside it today is largely an empty shell.