One slave worker on the imperial mausoleum was called Yu. His title was bugeng, denoting a low-ranking civil servant, and his place of origin was Bochang, a village more than 1,000 kilometres from Xi’an towards the northeastern edge of the empire. An educated man, an ex-civil servant, perhaps Yu had been an officer for the former Qi state. Sentenced to hard labour for an unknown crime, he had been part of a chain gang, led along the road routes up the Yellow River valley to the huge construction site under Mount Li. He never returned to his homeland.
