Shi Jun was a leader of the Sogdian community at Xi’an, the old Chang’an. His Sogdian name was Wirkak.[1] His tomb is one of four tombs of Central Asians, mostly Sogdians, that have been found at Xi’an and Taiyuan since 1999. The others are those of Kang Ye, buried in 571, of An Jia, buried in 579, and of Yu Hong, buried in 592.[1] Each held an epitaph in Chinese or in Sino-Sogdian and a stone funerary couch or house-shaped sarcophagus with painted reliefs.[1] Shi Jun’s epitaph puts his burial in 580, at the end of the Northern Zhou.[1]

The epitaph

The epitaph is written in Sogdian and in Chinese. It is the earliest bilingual epitaph found in China.[2] The Sogdian part gives his personal name, Wirkak, wrk’k.[2] The Chinese part gives no personal name. It says only that his forebears came from the city-state of Shi, Kesh, the modern Shahr-i Sabz in Uzbekistan.[2] The Chinese of his time therefore called him Shi Jun, “the lord from Shi”. The name by which he is known describes his origin.[2] His grandfather had already come to the realm of the Northern Wei.[2] The Chinese part names his wife only as “née Kang”, a woman from Kang, that is Samarkand. The Sogdian part gives her own name, wy’wsyh. His children have only Sogdian names, which the epitaph writes in Chinese transcription.[2]

The epitaph makes him a sabao. It is the first text to set the Sogdian s’rtp’w beside the Chinese title.[3] A passage on the couple’s life together in paradise resembles the wording of a Pahlavi and Chinese epitaph of 874. That epitaph wishes that the dead go on living in paradise with Ahura Mazda. Modern accounts understand the passage as a ritual formula of Zoroastrianism.[2]

The sarcophagus

The sarcophagus is of stone, in the form of a Chinese timber house. It was most probably put together inside the burial chamber.[4] No wooden coffin was used.[5] Fire altars stand on both sides of its entrance.[6] The reliefs show a deity in half-human, half-bird form, with the mouth-veil padām and barsom twigs, before a tray of offerings. This scene is identified as the chahārom ceremony of the fourth morning after death. The reliefs also show the crossing of the Chinvat bridge.[7] Some of the scenes may be Manichaean, and so the earliest Manichaean images in China.[6]

The Sogdian text of the epitaph calls the stone house βykt’k, “house of god”. It is the only such naming.[8] The epitaph also has an unusual place: a long tablet above the door of the sarcophagus, not a square slab on the floor of the tomb.[8] Modern accounts take both points to show that the house was held to be a shrine.[8]

The reliefs

The reliefs show the life of the dead man, as those of the other Sogdian monuments do.[1] On the north wall, a figure in a winged crown is the chief figure in two banquets and a hunt. His crown has a small circle and a crescent between the wings.[9] At the right end of the same wall, Shi Jun comes with his caravan to a king who sits in a yurt.[9]

The king in the yurt

In the art of this period, a figure in a yurt is the usual sign of a ruler of nomads.[9] On the couches of An Jia and of the Miho Museum, a nomad ruler sits in a tent in the same way. The long hair down his back marks him as a Göktürk.[9] The king on Shi Jun’s wall has a winged crown and no long hair. He is not a Persian, since a Sasanian king would not be shown in a yurt.[9]

He may be a ruler of the Hephthalites, a nomadic people that had come under Sasanian cultural influence.[9] A second line of argument reaches the same result. Winged crowns appear on the coins of the Nezakshah dynasty of Kapisa soon after the fall of the Hephthalite realm. This suggests that the Hephthalites had set the fashion. Shi Jun’s life, which ended in 579, lay in the Hephthalite period rather than in the Göktürk one.[9] If this identification holds, the relief is the first evidence that a leader of the Sogdian community in China dealt directly with a Hephthalite ruler, as the couch of An Jia shows for a Göktürk one.[9]

The second winged crown

The figure of the banquets and the hunt wears a winged crown too, but a different one from the king’s.[9] He may be another Hephthalite ruler. Alternatively he is Shi Jun himself, because on the Sogdian monuments it is almost always the dead man who stands out in banquets and hunts.[10] In that case the winged crown was also a headdress of Sogdian leaders in China. Yu Hong wears it in the same way on his sarcophagus at Taiyuan.[11]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Kageyama 2007, p. 11
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Müller 2008, p. 126
  3. ^ Müller 2008, p. 122, 123
  4. ^ Müller 2008, p. 129, 137
  5. ^ Müller 2008, p. 129
  6. ^ a b Müller 2008, p. 130
  7. ^ Müller 2008, p. 131
  8. ^ a b c Müller 2008, p. 138
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i Kageyama 2007, p. 12
  10. ^ Kageyama 2007, p. 12-13
  11. ^ Kageyama 2007, p. 13

Literature

  • Etsuko Kageyama, The Winged Crown and the Triple-crescent Crown in the Sogdian Funerary Monuments from China: Their Relation to the Hephthalite Occupation of Central Asia (2007)
  • Shing Müller, Sogdier in China um 600 n. Chr. Archäologische Zeugnisse eines Lebens zwischen Assimilation und Identitätsbewahrung (2008)

Related

What links here8

Conflicts
The Göktürk–Hephthalite war, 555–563
Places
Sogdiana
Peoples
Hephthalites · Sogdians
Sources
Tomb of An Jia · Tomb of Kang Ye · Tomb of Yu Hong
Controversies
Turkic-Sogdian Synthesis

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Tomb of Shi Jun.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/tomb-of-shi-jun/

Last revised: 8 November 2026