Animals at the Ming Tombs

Almost every tourist in China visits Beijing. He or she would go first to visit the Great Wall. But not many would know that they would be just a short distance from the thirteen Ming Tombs. It is another unbelievable historical World Heritage Site. We should certainly appreciate that our ancesters left them for us. I believe that the Ming dynasty had a total of 14 emperors and thirteen of them are buried in this site, situated all around the mountains as shown in the picture below:

At the entrance to the site, in the middle of the picture, the tombs were guarded first by different animals, and then by human statues, as in the pictures below:

In 1981, not only could you walk among these animals, you could also climb on top of them. You can no longer even see these precious statues as they are protected from visitors.