People who pay attention to archaeology probably know that many cultural relics have been greatly damaged after excavation because of improper protection, so cultural relics protection is a very important thing for modern archaeological work.
If you go to museums often, you will find that basically all museums have high requirements for air temperature and humidity, which is one of the most basic measures for cultural relics protection. Even some cultural relics will be directly protected on the site because of inconvenient storage, such as the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang. But have you ever seen a relic that is placed in the open air and is not worried about the wind and the sun?
Since it can be placed in the open air, this cultural relic itself is a thief or a tomb robber can not steal, either very large or very heavy, the wind and the sun do not care, it shows that the appearance of the cultural relics is not afraid of wind and rain, is there really such a cultural relic? Of course there is, and it is very famous, is the Kaiyuan Iron Bull discovered in the late 1980s.
The Kaiyuan Iron Bull is not just one cow, but four iron cows. They look much larger than real cattle, 1.5 meters high from the measurement, 3.3 meters long, and together with the chassis and the iron column of the tethered cow, the total weight is up to 70 tons, which is still the weight of an iron cow.
The four iron cattle were salvaged from the Yellow River in Yongji County, Shanxi. According to archaeologists, these iron cows were cast during the Kaiyuan period of the Tang Dynasty, so archaeologists called them Kaiyuan iron cattle. We all know that the Yellow River, as one of the mother rivers of Chinese civilization, flooded almost every year in ancient times, resulting in the flooding of tens of thousands of fertile fields along the river and the displacement of people.
Don't say that it was during the war years, that is, the Tang Dynasty, which was relatively stable, would happen like this, and the ancient people were superstitious, believing that the reason why the Yellow River would flood was entirely because the river god was angry, so they wanted to use iron bulls to suppress the river god. At that time, the iron bull did not sink directly in the Yellow River, but was placed on both sides of the Yellow River, and prayed for the role of the Pujin Bridge in pressing the tail.
The course of the Yellow River has undergone thousands of years of changes, and later it actually let the big iron cattle sink deep into the sediment of the Yellow River, and it took a lot of effort to fish them out in 1989. It is reasonable to say that what should be properly preserved is, after all, the cultural relics of the Tang Dynasty period, and they must be specially guarded, but because their four large iron cattle are really difficult to transport, they should consider staying in the local area.
First, the big iron bull was built to place their houses, one to preserve the big iron bull, and the other to be for people to visit, and as a result, the big iron cow did not seem to be suitable for this high-standard treatment, and actually began to rust. This deviated from the original intention of protecting cultural relics, and later found that if placed in the open air, it would delay the speed of rusting of the big iron bull, so the four big iron cows were left on the bank of the Yellow River and became a beautiful landscape.