Vanished Hills, Cemetery Memory, and Funeral Reform in Rural China: The Badoushan Landscape Narrative from Jiepai, Jiangsu

This record is a primary-source archival item about vanished hills, cemetery memory, mountain myth, quarrying, cremation reform, and local deathscape in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in Chinese deathscape studies, funeral reform, cemetery studies, rural China studies, Jiangnan local history, place-based folklore, landscape memory, and local lexicon. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “Badoushan,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a Jiepai landscape narrative concerning vanished hills, mountain myth, stone quarrying, revolutionary martyr-cemetery memory, cremation reform, and the transformation of a named hill into a local cemetery. It preserves Badoushan as a local name that continues to organize death, memory, burial reform, place attachment, and local historical imagination even after the hills themselves have disappeared. The record’s value lies in Chinese deathscape studies, cemetery memory, funeral reform, cremation reform, vanished landscape, mountain myth, quarrying memory, rural China studies, Jiangnan local history, place-based folklore, and local lexicon. It records how a named landscape moved from mythic hill, to revolutionary commemorative site, to quarrying source, to disappeared terrain, and finally to local cemetery space. Methodologically, this item combines the Archive Author’s childhood memory, family oral transmission, later questioning of the author’s father, remembered school ritual, local historical knowledge, narrative clarification, local lexical explanation, and author annotations. The annotations distinguish mythic narration, father-based explanation, author-known historical memory, cremation-era cemetery transformation, local vocabulary, and provenance boundaries. A key feature of this record is the movement from mountain myth to deathscape. Badoushan is remembered as having once consisted of two basket-shaped hills, one of which was said to have been moved into place by Taibai Jinxing. Later, the site became associated with a revolutionary martyr cemetery, quarrying for house foundations, disappearance of the hills, and eventual use as the local cemetery after the decline of earth burial and the normalization of cremation. The record also preserves local lexical items, including “qì fángzi,” meaning to build a house; “shíjiǎo,” a local term for foundation involving large stones; and “chūtián,” meaning funeral procession or taking the dead out for burial or post-death rites. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20848951. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include the Badoushan location map, current-site photographs, raw spatial materials, private videos, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.