Situated 1.5 kilometers to the north of Huaiyang County, on the banks of Gucai River and Chenghu Lake, Taihao Fuxi Mausoleum, a national-level key protection unit of historical relics, is a cluster of palace-styled ancient buildings, looking splendid in green and gold. The mausoleum features imposing buildings, magnificent halls, tall cypress and pine trees.
A sage emperor of the ancient Chinese mythology, Taihao Fuxi tops all the kings and leads the “Three Emperors” and “Five Kings”. In the transition of the human society from the maternal side to paternal side, he had scored great achievements and made unparalleled contributions and therefore was reputed as “the Founding ancestor”. Taihao, a eulogy for Fuxi, means boundless merits and achievements shining like the sun and the moon. To commemorate him, the earliest mausoleum had been constructed in the Period of Spring and Autumn. When Confucius came to Chen Kingdom, the king then accompanied him to pay homage to Fuxi. In the period of The Three Kingdoms, Cao Zhi, an important figure of Wei Kingdom, wrote “A Hymn to Fuxi”. Since the Tang and Song Dynasties, the mausoleum has been continually expanded to the area of nearly 60 hectares, including the graveyard and the temple of sacrifice.
The style of the mausoleum follows the Ming architecture, with a similar layout of the imperial palace of the Ming Dynasty. It is divided into two parts, the inner city, or the Forbidden City and the outer city or the Imperial city. The sides of the road are adorned by old-aged cypresses. The courtyard is filled with numerous steles and tablets. The morning tolls and evening drums carry far away. The main hall or the front hall is the largest building in the mausoleum that covers an area of 390m2. In the hall, there is a big shrine in which sits the statue of Fuxi, accompanied by the statures of Shen Nong, Yellow emperor, Shao Hao and Zhuan Xu (All of them are legendary emperors in ancient China). The tomb of Fuxi is over 20 meters in height with a perimeter of over 150 meters. The top of the tomb is round shaped and the bottom is square, signaling the legendary saying of the round sky and square earth. A tablet of one meter wide and 3 meters tall was erected before the tomb, reading the Tomb of Taihao Fuxi. Legend has it that it was the handwriting of Su Xiaomei, a writer of the Song Dynasty.
