The story about Zhang Xianzhong's sinking silver has been circulated for 300 years, of which there is a song and ballad circulating in Chengdu: "Stone cow to stone drum, silver is fifteen thousand, some people can recognize it, buy all the Chengdu province", stone cow to stone drum is a mark, who finds, who can find the treasure, because of the long age, presumably the stone drum stone cow has long disappeared, so no one has cracked for 300 years, Zhang Xianzhong shipwreck has been circulated as a folk story.
However, according to historical records, Zhang Xianzhong did loot a lot of treasures, and the "Chronicle of the Shu Difficulties" recorded: "Hundreds of millions of ships, carrying hundreds of ships", but they disappeared for no reason, which made people quite puzzled.
However, in 2016, Zhang Xianzhong's sinking silver matter had a turnaround, because of the cracking of a major case, Zhang Xianzhong's sinking silver is no longer a legend, this case is the Pengshan extraordinarily large thief excavation and resale of cultural relics case, the amount involved in the case exceeded 100 million, after investigation found that the stolen cultural relics originated from Zhang Xianzhong's shipwreck.
Among them, it contains the national first-class cultural relics, the Golden Seal of the Grand Marshal of Tiger Button Yongchang, with a gold content of 95% and a weight of 6 kilograms, which was once stolen and sold by 7.7 million yuan, but fortunately this big seal was recovered.
So how did the excavators find the location of the sinking silver, in fact, it was unintentionally discovered, because the villagers near the Minjiang River often have villagers who fish, and from time to time they can salvage some gold and silver in the river, and the news does not go away, at most, at night in the center of the Minjiang River, there are more than a dozen boats looking for treasures on the river, and even some people wear diving suits to find treasures.
In the villages near Minjiang, many people inexplicably began to become very rich, and some people also drove luxury cars, and the news continued to spread, triggering more people to come to the treasure hunt, and in 2015, as many as 10 gangs of pirated cultural relics were destroyed, and then many local villagers took the initiative to hand over cultural relics that had been inadvertently salvaged in the river.
With the cracking of the Pengshan case, the state also carried out rescue excavations of Zhang Xianzhong's sinking silver location, the Minjiang River channel was closed, after the water diversion, the riverbed was completely exposed, the scene was quite spectacular, the riverbed was sprinkled with gold and silver, and thousands of cultural relics were unearthed.
Among them, the "Shu ShiziBao" gold seal was also excavated, regardless of the value of cultural relics, compared with the golden seal of the Great Marshal of the Tiger Button Yongchang, the "Shu Shizibao" was 16 pounds, and the gold content was also 95%, which could not be said to be exaggerated.
The excavated gold ingots need to be held with both hands, and some of them are the official silver of the year.
According to the conservative estimated value of the gold and silver utensils excavated at the site is about 3 billion yuan, so far there have been three excavations, one is in 2005 Minjiang River construction excavated part of the cultural relics, the other is the 2016 river rescue excavation, 2011 there are still cultural relics unearthed, including the Xiwang Gonggong gold and silver coins.
Although tens of millions of cultural relics have been unearthed, there are still archaeologists who say that this is only part of Zhang Xianzhong's shipwreck, according to a sentence in the aforementioned "Shu Difficulty Chronicle": "Carrying a hundred ships" Is obviously not on the right number, or after 300 years of river water erosion, some cultural relics with the river rush downstream is not known.
I hope that one day Zhang Xianzhong Shenyin can completely surface, which is of immeasurable value to historical research, so that more people can borrow cultural relics to peek at the historical truth is also a good thing.