Dynastic History | Tamaudun 玉陵, Naha — The Tablet That Names Who May Be Buried

Tamaudun 玉陵 was cut into a coral limestone slope below Shuri in 1501, when Shō Shin 尚真, third king of the second Shō line, moved his father Shō En's remains into a stone-faced tomb of three chambers. The middle chamber held the dead until the bones had been washed; the east chamber then took the king and queen, the west the relatives named as eligible.

Named where? On a tablet beside the entrance. The 玉陵碑 does not commemorate — it legislates. It lists nine people who may be interred here: Shō Shin himself, Shō En's queen and eldest daughter, and six of Shō Shin's children, with their descendants after them. It calls down the curses of heaven and earth on anyone who puts someone else inside. Two of Shō Shin's sons are not on the list. The inscription gives no reason; Naha City's own account of the monument reads the omission as a sign of conflict inside the house.

The tomb went up in the same decades in which Shō Shin required the aji — the local lords who had held the island's gusuku — to live at Shuri, away from the districts they came from, and had the weapons they held gathered in for the kingdom's use.

The chambers were badly damaged in 1945 and restored from 1974 over roughly three years, so most of what a visitor sees is postwar work on pre-war fabric. The five structures were designated a National Treasure on 25 December 2018, the first building in Okinawa Prefecture to be. The city's management office runs the site — nine to six, ¥300 — and the chambers stay shut.

📸 Cover: The middle and west burial chambers, そらみみ, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons