Walking through central Gyeongju, green hills appear abruptly between the buildings. First-time visitors sometimes take them for landscaping; they are the tombs of Silla kings and nobles from fifteen centuries ago. Daereungwon holds twenty-three of these mounds with paths running between them, so you end up walking among graves. The city absorbed the space of the dead instead of pushing it out — and Gyeongju is the only Korean city left in that shape.
Silla tombs have an unusual structure. A wooden chamber held the coffin and grave goods, stones were piled over it, and earth was mounded on top — a stone-mounded wooden chamber tomb. The design makes looting extremely difficult, because digging into the stones brings them down. As a result, Silla tombs far more often yield their contents intact than tombs of other periods, and that structural fact is a large part of why so many Silla artefacts, gold crowns among them, survive.
Cheonmachong was excavated in 1973. The dig produced a painting of a horse on birch bark, and the tomb was named for it. Two things are worth knowing alongside that: the painting was on a saddle flap hung at the horse's side, and there is a scholarly argument over whether the animal depicted is a horse or a qilin. Cheonmachong has since been fitted out so visitors can go inside and see a reconstruction of the wooden chamber and the arrangement of grave goods.
Daereungwon changes character with season and hour. Magnolia and cherry bloom between the mounds in spring; summer deepens the grass until the ridgelines sharpen; on autumn evenings long shadows fall across the curves. That is why photographers cluster here at dawn and dusk. Cheomseongdae and Donggung-Wolji are within walking distance, and looping the three together is the standard downtown Gyeongju route.