Chinese heritage workers said Tuesday they have discovered well-preserved frescos in a tomb dating back about 2,000 years in east China's Shandong Province.

The frescos painted with blue, green, black, and red were found on the walls of a tomb at an old residential yard in Dongping County, southwestern Shandong, when a real estate company was excavating the foundation for a planned shopping mall.

The paintings included images of drinking, dancing, cock fighting, women servants, and historical stories, said Yang Hao, deputy director of Dongping Cultural Heritage Administration Bureau.

Yang said the frescos were the best-preserved ones discovered in the region so far and would be valuable in the study of funeral and folk customs and painting arts during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC -25 AD).

One of the paintings showed a meeting between the two famous Chinese philosophers Laozi (about 600 BC-500 BC) and Confucius (551 BC-479 BC). Wang said the painting was valuable to scholars because they had long argued about the real appearance of Confucius, who is reputed by some to have been ugly.

(Xinhua News Agency October 17, 2007)