Yesterday morning, a mistake that has lasted for nearly a thousand years was corrected, and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage announced that the bailuyuan Jiangcun tomb in Xi'an City, Shaanxi Province, is the tomb of emperor Wen of Han.
The "Phoenix Mouth" has always been considered to be the location of the Baling Tombs, why has this mistake not been discovered for so many years?
White Deer Plains Phoenix Mouth: A Misidentification of Baling for Thousands of Years
The evaluation of Emperor Wen of Han in the history books is often thrifty, generous and loving to the people, as we all know, in the early Han Dynasty, due to years of war and chaos, caused by social decay, Emperor Wen pursued a policy of cultivation and recuperation, and he himself has been practicing thriftiness for more than twenty years, Sima Qian's "History of Filial Piety" records that "twenty-three years after reigning, the palace court dog and horse costume imperial court have nothing to gain", which means that during the reign of Emperor Wen, he did not build palace buildings and garden gardens like usual kings, nor did he add clothing vehicles or raise pets such as dogs and horses, for the king, It's not easy to do that.
Portrait of Emperor Wen of Han
For his own tomb, emperor Wen, who practiced frugality, also had his own ideas. He denounced the ugly customs of thick burials, demanded that he handle funerals for himself from simplicity, and advocated "thin burials" for his home destination "Baling", which is recorded in the Book of Han and Emperor Wen: "All are made of pottery, and must not be decorated with gold, silver, copper and tin, and do not rule graves, and want to be a province, and do not bother the people... In the summer of the seventh year, in June, the emperor collapsed in Weiyang Palace... Testament: Because of this, the Baling Mountains and Rivers have not changed... Burial Tombs. "That is, to repair the tomb according to the original appearance of the mountains and rivers, and not to build a large number of civil engineering for the repair of the tombs and change the original appearance of the mountains and rivers."
Archaeological site of the burial pit outside the Gangchon Tomb (November 2020)
The construction of the mausoleum will not be greatly changed, and it is bound that the tomb of Emperor Wen will be very hidden, and may not be "sealed", that is, it will not have a huge "earth bag" visible to the naked eye like other Han Dynasty emperors.
This also allows posterity to have two inferences about the place of its burial: one is the "cliff tomb theory", which believes that the Baling tomb is located on the cliff, and the high cliff of the "Phoenix Mouth" just verifies this statement; the second is the "Mountain Tibet Theory", which believes that the Baling is built in the mountain, related to the terrain, and does not need to be sealed separately, and there is a mention in the "Three Auxiliary Yellow Maps" that "Emperor Wen's Tomb, in the seventy miles east of Chang'an City, because the mountain is hidden, there is no grave." "The phoenix mouth is a protruding hill, its north slope is triangular, and the whole mountain shape is very similar to the appearance of the imperial tomb sealing soil.
It has long been mistaken for the phoenix mouth of the Baling
In the absence of advanced technical means and perfect archaeology conditions, people through this series of text, geography and other related information inferred, and finally came to the conclusion that the Phoenix Mouth is the site of the Han Emperor's mausoleum, and the Yuan Dynasty "Class Editor Chang'an Zhi" has recorded that the Han Emperor's mausoleum is located in the Phoenix Mouth. Under the multiple influences of the blessing of the terrain and the record of the history book "Because the mountain is the tomb", the front of the "Phoenix Mouth" is full of stele stones, and the more important ones are the "Kangxi Twenty-seven Year Imperial Monument", "Yongzheng First Year Sacrifice Monument" and "Jiaqing Twenty-four Year Imperial Sacrifice Monument". The tallest and largest piece in the middle is the "Tomb of Emperor Wen of Han" written by Bi Yuan, the inspector of Shaanxi in the forty-first year of the Qianlong Dynasty.
In fact, the Jiangcun Tomb, which is now recognized as the mausoleum of Emperor Wen of Han, does have no sealing soil on the surface and has no obvious imperial tomb characteristics, which also led to this error that lasted for thousands of years.
Jiangcun Tomb "Baling" archaeological results are fruitful
Jiangcun Tomb is located at the western end of Bailuyuan in the eastern suburbs of Xi'an, about 800 meters northeast is the Mausoleum of Empress Dou, about 2000 meters southwest of the Southern Tomb of Empress Bo, and about 2100 meters north is the "Phoenix Mouth" location where the former state security unit Baling is located.
In 2016, the outer pit of the Jiangcun Tomb was disturbed, in order to confirm the preservation status of the tomb and the distribution of surrounding cultural relics, archaeologists conducted systematic archaeological investigation and exploration of the Tomb of Empress Dou and the Southern Tomb of Empress Bo and the "Phoenix Mouth" site that is said to be the tomb of Emperor Wen of Han, and carried out archaeological excavations of the outer pit of the mausoleum, and gradually confirmed that the Jiangcun Tomb was the tomb of Liu Heng, the emperor of the early Han Dynasty in the Western Han Dynasty.
Stolen cultural relics from jiangcun tomb (picture from Shaanxi Provincial Archaeological Research Institute)
Jiangcun tomb plane is "Ya" shape, the surface of the land is not sealed, the burial chamber side length of about 72 meters, more than 30 meters deep, more than 110 outer hidden pits were found around the tomb, the outer pit has pebble paved cemetery facilities (tentatively named "Stone Boundary"), the side length is about 390 meters, the four sides of the stone fence are directly in front of the door site, it is speculated that it may be an independent imperial mausoleum (Empress Dou's mausoleum also has an independent mausoleum). Outside the Jiangcun Tomb and empress Dou's mausoleum, the remains of the mausoleum wall were found, and it is speculated that they are in the same mausoleum.
Archaeology has excavated 8 outer pits of Jiangcun Tomb, and unearthed more than 1,500 pieces of pottery figurines, copper seals, copper carriages and horses, iron tools, pottery, etc., and the copper seals have "Chefu", "Instrument House", "Riding Thousand People in China", "Fuyin", "Cangyin", "ZhongsikongYin", etc., indicating that the outer Tibetan pits around jiangcun tombs should be built to imitate the actual official office and the government treasury.
Part of the archaeological discovery of the Gangchon Tomb Photography Solemn
The shape and scale of the Jiangcun Tomb are in line with the highest level tomb specifications of the Western Han Dynasty, coupled with the distribution of the Tomb of Empress Dou and the Tomb of Empress Bo around it, experts confirm that the Tomb of Jiangcun is the Tomb of emperor Wen of Han.
This archaeological work has determined the exact location of the tombs of Emperor Wen of the Han Dynasty and solved the problem of the names of the eleven imperial tombs of the Western Han Dynasty. The structural layout of the Double Mausoleum, the Imperial Tomb Center, and the Outer Hidden Pit shows obvious differences with the Ancestral Tomb of Han Gao and the Mausoleum of Emperor Hui of Han, which lays the foundation of the imperial tomb system in the middle and late Western Han Dynasty, and is of great significance to the in-depth study of the imperial tomb system in ancient China.
References: CCTV News; Shaanxi Cultural Relics Bureau;