The skull wall is near the Duoduoka Charnel Ground in the western part of Biru County, 300 kilometers southeast Naqu in Tibet Autonomous Region. The name "Biru" originally meant the "horn of female Tibetan yak", according to a local saga, a "tribe of female yak" once settled down here.
The skull wall is a result of Tibet's unique celestial burial tradition. The Duoduoka Charnel Ground occupies an area of about 4,000 square meters. Earthen walls roughly as tall as a man stand on the ground's four sides. On the south and west walls, there are some wooden shelves, between four to five stories each, each shelf displaying some orderly-placed human skulls.
There are two gates respectively on the west and south of the Duoduoka Charnel Ground's courtyard. The west gate is for living human beings, while the one on the south is where the bodies are carried in. The bungalow on the north is exclusively for the monks who carry out the religious celestial burial ceremonies, and inside the rooms are some religious scriptures and figures.
Beneath the courtyard of the charnel ground is a cellar, whose floor and walls are built of stones, and which stores Buddha figures, the Tripitaka (the three major parts of Buddha's teachings), and religious tools and sacrifices.
The winter here can be extremely cold, sometimes falling as low as 37-Celsius degrees below zero. However, no matter how frozen the body is, following a night in the celestial burial pool, it will surely unfreeze the next day, thus ensuring a smooth celestial burial. Nobody yet can explain this phenomenon. This mystery has made the Duoduoka Charnel Ground even more famous, even attracting some people from neighboring counties to choose it for their own death.
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