Hu Songmei, an archaeologist at the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology, said this was the first time that a complete panda skeleton had been found in an emperor’s tomb.
She said archaeologists had found the skull of a giant panda in the tomb of Emperor Wen’s mother Consort Bo in 1975 but the body was missing.
Archeologists have found a large variety of wild animals, which they believe were a status symbol for the Han rulers, in Shaanxi’s royal tombs.
Hu said her team had also found the skeleton of an Asian tapir – which became extinct in China about 1,000 years ago and is now listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature – in the tomb.
Tigers and yaks were also buried with the emperor, while his mother’s tomb contained the remains of a red-crowned crane, a peacock, a snub-nosed monkey and tortoise.
Hu said the rare, wild animals only appeared in the tombs of the emperor, empress and the emperor’s mother and said some of them may have been offerings from southern China.
However, she also said it was possible that there were more pandas in Shaanxi during the Han dynasty, suggesting the climate in the province was wetter and warmer than it is today, allowing bamboo to grow.
The skeleton was found in a satellite burial chamber. Photo: Shaanxi TV
Hu said archaeologists would carry out a DNA analysis on the animals to identify what they ate and where they came from.
Previously archaeologists found a new – and now extinct – species of gibbon in the tomb of Lady Xia, the grandmother of China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang.