Uphill fight to save the Bo coffins Uphill fight to save the Bo coffins

NINETY metres up a sheer cliff face is an extraordinary place to put your dead. But there they hang, several coffins made from whole wood logs balanced precariously on two or three wooden beams driven into the sandstone rock. Nothing holds them in place, yet they have rested there for an estimated 400 years.

There are 14, with eight easily visible. 'They are spectacular,' China Exploration and Research Society chief Wong How-man says, after a visit to survey one of 22 sites of the hanging coffins of the Bo people in southwest China, about 300 kilometres south of Chengdu. Other coffins, older than these, have finally plummeted to the ground, and his group is fighting to conserve those that are left.

Hong Kong-based Mr Wong set up the society after working for National Geographic magazine. An explorer at heart - he found the source of the Yangtze River in the 1980s - his observations and love of China have led him to conserve, among other things, Tibetan monastery murals. World efforts to save the endangered Tibetan antelope owe much to his work surveying them in their northwest China home. Now he has turned his attention to the coffins.

In the 1950s, a mainland government survey identified 200 caskets grouped throughout a two-kilometre valley that straddles Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. Mr Wong's 1988 survey found 128. The Cultural Revolution put paid to some, which were used for target practice, but the main reason the number has fallen is simple decay: the rotting of the wood and the gradual slip of the supporting beams. 'Everything remaining now is quite precarious,' Mr Wong says. He shows a picture in which one coffin has toppled threateningly over one decayed beam, and if it falls, all below it will also be smashed.

But a problem other than decay faces the coffins' preservation: a modern form of grave-robber.

Mr Wong last saw the 90-metre-high group of coffins, which he describes as the 'most dramatic' of all, in 1988. They are the furthest hike from the road into the valley, and the highest up the escarpment - to the naked eye, mere specks under a shrub-covered overhang.