In The history of China, there are records of 13 feudal dynasties with their capital in present-day Xi'an, Shaanxi. This also makes Xi'an retain many sites and relics of great research value. The excavation of ancient tombs in Xi'an and the suspension of the project have also been in the news many times, making people no longer rare and strange.
However, what many people don't know is that in 1999, 22 years away from now, a brick factory in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, dug up gold cakes worth 2 billion yuan, but because the country's awareness of the protection of cultural relics was still relatively weak at that time, and the people basically did not understand the law, the gold cake was robbed by villagers as soon as it appeared. To this day, people who know this matter are still paying attention to the follow-up results.
Digging out the gold cake was robbed
November 2, 1999, was supposed to be a very ordinary day. But on this day, a brick factory called Xinhua Brick Factory in Tan's hometown of Beishilipu Village in Weiyang District, Xi'an City, staged a shocking scene.
At that time, a driver in the brick factory was using a shovel to fetch soil, but when the bucket of the shovel was buried in the ground and was blocked by a hard object, it caused the driver to be puzzled.
He got out of the car to check and found that the shoveler's tracks were also stuck by something. In order to get the job done as quickly as possible, he had to find something to block the shovel's action, but what he did not expect was that this "roadblock" was not the stone and rubble he thought, but a piece of gold that was shining brightly. This shocked him.
Soon, after digging up the gold, the driver wondered if there was any other gold. Surprised, he quickly flipped into the driver's seat of the shovel, turned the entire field over, and when he encountered an obstacle, he got out of the car and dug it out by hand.
In this way, the driver has dug out hundreds of pieces of gold. And that's just the gold hidden on the surface. Unable to resist the temptation of gold, the driver later removed the shovel directly, and he continued to turn the soil in this area, and indeed dug out more gold.
At this time, he was finally able to stop for a while and carefully observe the gold excavated. And it was after careful examination that he showed that these golds were vaguely carved patterns and words, which made him guess that they should have been buried in ancient times.
The driver's action quickly attracted the attention of passing villagers. After someone shouted out in shock that there was gold, many villagers who were close to hearing the sound rushed to snatch the gold scattered on the ground.
There are also villagers who come after them trying to turn over the land again to find more gold.
Recover the gold cake
The news of the gold excavation reached the ears of experts. By the time they arrived at the scene with police officers and sealed off the scene, the gold buried here had actually been snatched away by the villagers. So when they arrived, all they saw was a mess that had suddenly been repeatedly turned over and trampled on.
If it is determined that the "golden cakes" snatched by the villagers are real gold and contain carved patterns and characters on the surface, they are undoubtedly historical relics of great research value. In this case, if the villagers want to collect privately or trade it, it will be illegal and punished by law.
Both the police and experts are very frustrated with the villagers' approach, but they know that they are in the backward countryside and do not know the law very well, so they also tend to do ideological work in the process of tracing, and find the gold cake by publicizing the importance of protecting cultural relics to them.
In the face of villagers who refuse to return them, the police will also popularize relevant national laws and regulations to them, telling them the punishment they will receive after illegally occupying cultural relics.
But even after more than a hundred rounds of visits, the police eventually recovered most of the gold cakes, and a small number of them were secretly hidden in the homes of villagers.
Among them, a migrant worker who came to work here secretly hid 18 pieces of gold cakes, and in order to avoid the police's pursuit, he also ran to Xunyang County in southern Shaanxi hundreds of miles away to hide, and later the police struggled to investigate, and only then brought these 18 gold cakes back. In this way, the police and experts eventually recovered all the gold cakes, a total of 112 pieces.
At the same time that experts were studying these gold cakes, the Xinhua Brick Factory, which was originally found to have gold cakes, had made new discoveries.
The staff found another large pit of gold cakes not far from the previous driver's digging, dug out 107 gold cakes from the inside, and quietly handed them to the police, avoiding the villagers' robbery again.
In this way, archaeologists in Xi'an have also successively obtained a total of 219 gold cakes unearthed, and carried out meticulous cleaning and research on them.
The origin and value of gold cakes
In the process of studying the gold cake, archaeologists can directly find that these gold cakes are basically maintained in the shape and size and shape of the basic consistency, are the back of the convex, the front is concave, one side is smooth, the other side is rough, and basically engraved with words, symbols, patterns, most of them are also on this basis, marked with stamps, stamps and so on.
In addition to these discoveries, archaeologists have measured that the total weight of these gold cakes is nearly 54,000 grams, each of which is about 247 grams, and the diameter is about 6.30 cm and the thickness is about 1.19 cm.
What is even more shocking is that these gold cakes have been measured and concluded that the purity is generally as high as 97% or even 99%. This also gives experts a preliminary speculation that these gold cakes should come from the tomb of a high-ranking nobleman in ancient times.
Subsequently, archaeologists made new discoveries, believing that the gold cake found this time was unearthed from mass burial sites and was an abnormal way of deep burial. Such discoveries clearly stand in stark contrast to the value of high-purity gold, and as a result arouse strong curiosity about the owners of these golds.
After reviewing the relevant materials and studying the patterns and writing on the gold cakes, archaeologists speculated that the gold cakes were most likely owned by the new emperor Wang Mang.
After the complete decline of the Western Han Dynasty, Wang Mang established a new dynasty and ascended the throne as emperor, which enabled him to inherit the treasury gold accumulated by the previous Han Dynasty for many generations, and because Wang Mang himself was very fond of collecting gold, he later not only ordered the confiscation of private gold, but also issued a decree requiring princes below to hold gold. This also makes the world's gold gather in his hands.
Later historians speculated that Wang Mang held gold, and once gave Wang Mang the speculation that there were as many as 700,000 pounds of gold, and such a weight was converted into today's weight, which is equivalent to about 170 tons, which is undoubtedly a very large amount.
However, when Wang Mang died, the various places were once again in war, and the soldiers who could take the gold from the palace could not bring large pieces of gold with a large weight in order to march and fight, so they could only steal some small and valuable gold cakes.
Archaeologists speculate that these soldiers stole the gold cake and buried it underground in the village of Shilipu in the northern suburbs of Xi'an, where they were stationed, but then they died in battle, and it became a mass burial post, and the gold cake they hid was buried deep in the ground, and it was only later discovered.
Regardless of whether the speculation about the origin of these gold cakes is correct, these particularly high-purity and finely crafted gold obviously have a very high value in addition to very high historical research value.
There was a precedent of a Han Dynasty gold cake being auctioned for a high price of 9.19 million yuan, so experts also estimate that the 219 gold cakes will reach a value of 2 billion yuan if they are to be auctioned.
Sure enough, at the Guardian auction in 2012, the 219 gold cakes were successfully auctioned at a high price of 2 billion yuan.
brief summary:
Xi'an, Shaanxi, as the capital chosen by the emperors of many dynasties, also retains many relics and legacies left over from that year. The 2 billion yuan worth of gold cakes dug up in 1999 is a small part of it.
At first, the villagers snatched up the gold cakes, but in the end, the police recovered all the gold cakes and handed them over to experts for study. This also makes these gold cakes with great research value finally be explored and their value can be better played.