Two of the three claims older accounts make about the hanging coffins need correcting, and the third turns out to be better attested than it looks. The people are most likely not the Ba: the only peer-reviewed genomic study of hanging-coffin populations links the custom to the Bo, and the 131 coffins surviving on a cliff in Zigui County are attributed to them too. The date of four thousand years ago is older than the earliest securely dated hanging coffin anywhere on earth, and the coffins in the gorges appear to be Tang-era, around twelve hundred years old. But the belief that a coffin set higher was better for the dead is not a modern gloss at all — it is recorded in a Yuan-dynasty Chinese account.
Ba or Bo, and why the two get confused
The names are one letter apart, both belong to the same part of China, and the gorges were historically Ba territory — so the confusion is easy to make and hard to unpick. It is worth setting out what each kind of source says rather than simply declaring one wrong.
The archaeological and genomic consensus points to the Bo. The only peer-reviewed genomic study of hanging-coffin populations, published in November 2025, links the custom to the Bo, a people of south-western China, and does not mention the Ba at all. The 131 hanging coffins found on a hundred-metre cliff in Zigui County, Hubei, close to the dam site, are likewise attributed to the Bo and dated to around 1,200 years old, in the Tang dynasty.
Against that, the Ba attribution is not merely a travel-brochure invention. It appears in Chinese state media, which has published on the gorges' cliff burials under the framing of a Ba mystery, and the region was Ba country. The position that can be defended is therefore narrower than a flat correction: the attribution that the evidence supports is the Bo, and the Ba name circulates widely in sources that are not nonsense. Neither should be asserted as settled. Nothing reliable about who the Ba were could be reached, so that question is better left open than filled in.
Who the Bo were, and are
The study places the origin of the custom in the Mount Wuyi area of coastal Fujian, and links its practitioners genetically to coastal Neolithic southern East Asians, ancestral to speakers of the Tai-Kadai and Austronesian languages — which is to say not to an inland Sichuan or Chongqing people at all. That is a genuinely surprising result, and it is the reason the attribution question matters beyond pedantry.
The practice was far more widespread than the gorges. Chinese surveys record hundreds of hanging coffins across more than twenty counties, in Yunnan, Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Guangxi, Fujian and Taiwan, and related log-coffin burials occur across South-East Asia and the Pacific.
The Bo still exist. A community of 5,084 people in 42 villages in Qiubei County, Yunnan was recorded in 2003, speaking a Tibeto-Burman language and classified in 1956 within the Yi. Historical sources record persecution under the Ming, after which many fled and changed identity. Their own folklore names them the Subjugators of the Sky and the Sons of the Cliffs.
The dating, which is out by a factor of three
Older accounts put the practice four thousand years ago. That is older than the earliest securely dated hanging coffin found anywhere.
The earliest secure evidence is about 3,400 years old, radiocarbon-dated, and it is in the Wuyi Mountains in Fujian — not in the Yangtze gorges. The genomes examined in the study span roughly 660 to 2,490 years ago, and log-coffin burials in the wider region are described as Iron Age, running from about 2,300 to 1,000 years ago. The coffins in the gorges specifically appear to be Tang-era, around twelve hundred years old.
So for this stretch of river, the figure in older accounts is out by more than a factor of three, and it also quietly moves the custom's earliest known occurrence from coastal Fujian to the gorges.
The higher the coffin, the better for the dead
This is the claim that survives, and it deserves keeping rather than cutting.
A Yuan-dynasty account by Jing Li holds that coffins set high are auspicious, and that the higher the coffin, the more favourable for the dead. That is a documented historical belief recorded in a Chinese source, not a modern embellishment. The error in older accounts is one of attribution rather than substance: they present it as the doctrine of the Ba, where what can actually be said is that a Yuan-dynasty Chinese writer recorded the belief.
A related practice is worth noting alongside it. The Bo's later cave burials placed the spiritual essence of the deceased, rather than the physical remains, in ancestral caves — which suggests the height was understood to do something for the dead rather than merely to protect the body.
What survives, and what went under
UNESCO's tentative-list submission for the gorges, made in 2001, names suspended coffins on cliffs among the area's archaeological assets, which is official acknowledgement that they are a feature of this stretch of river in particular.
On what the reservoir destroyed, the honest answer is less definite than it is often made. Around 1,300 archaeological sites were inundated and some 8,000 unexcavated sites affected, on the geological survey's figures, but that survey does not itemise coffin sites, and the assertion that the coffin sites themselves were drowned could not be established from any source worth citing. What is documented is that 131 coffins survive above the waterline in Zigui County. Claiming more than that in either direction is not supportable.
Seeing them, and entering China
The coffins are cliff features rather than a managed site with opening hours, and no booking arrangement or published access scheme for any of them was traced. Nothing has been announced for them between now and the end of 2028.
On entry, one date governs everything. British citizens holding standard passports could enter mainland China visa-free for stays of up to thirty days until the end of December 2026, for tourism, business, visiting family or friends, and transit; longer stays, paid work, study and journalism need a visa arranged in advance, and no extension beyond 2026 has been announced. Place of residence must be registered with the local public security bureau within twenty-four hours of arrival, which hotels and river vessels normally handle on arrival.
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