In ancient China, there was a special profession - tomb keepers, most of the tomb keepers existed for the royal cemetery, they took the protection of the royal cemetery as their mission, and the profession of the tomb keeper was taken as the arrangement of God. The tomb keeper is not one or two people, it may be a family, or it may be everyone in one or several villages.
Ancient cemeteries are magnificent, especially
It is the emperor who loves to find immortality, who builds his own mausoleum like the one on the ground, and there will be a large number of funerary items to enter the tomb together, the most cruel of which is to let the harem concubines be martyred.
Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum is a typical representative, although so far the Shi Huang Mausoleum has not shown the whole picture, but from the years of detection results can see the grandeur of the Shi Huang Mausoleum, the most shocking is the shi huang mausoleum covers an area, there are more than seventy Forbidden City so much, it can be imagined that Qin Shi Huang also wants to continue to be the emperor underground after his death.
Since the beginning of the Han Dynasty, there have been tomb keepers, Han Gaozu Liu Bang once in order to appease the people's hearts, to avoid the Qin Shi Huang mausoleum was stolen and destroyed, and Qin Shi Huang has a large number of burial goods, there are a lot of treasures, which is also relatively important for the development of the Han Dynasty. Therefore, it is very necessary to arrange for people to guard the tomb.
Tomb keepers have been there for generations, especially after the death of those who have royal tombs or large families, most of them will be more or less guarded by people, and in ancient times, tomb keepers seemed to have become a profession. Why were those people able to become tomb keepers? One is that he has a relationship with the Twilight Lord and has great respect for the Twilight Lord, the second is that he has benefits in return, and the third may be forced to guard the tomb.
In ancient times, if you can become the tomb keeper of the royal garden mausoleum, you will inevitably be exempted from the servitude of all members of the tomb keeper's family, and the imperial court will also give the tomb keeper a "salary", they no longer have to engage in heavy manual labor, just keep the tomb well, one person to guard the tomb, the whole family is blessed.
The existence of the tomb keeper reflects people's maintenance of loyalty and filial piety, and the tomb guard is the protection and respect for the tomb from the surface, digging deeper into the depths, and the tomb guard is the product of the influence of traditional Confucianism in China. It is said that "the dead are great", and the ancient whipping corpse can be described as the most cruel punishment, and the tomb occupies an important place in the traditional ethics and morality of the Chinese.
Tomb keepers are not good, tomb keepers need patience, and generally tomb keepers are very afraid of life, only by loving life can they be a good tomb keeper. The She family, which guarded the tomb of Yuan Chonghuan from the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, can be said to embody the loyalty and filial piety to the fullest.
In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, social unrest, Emperor Taiji's army directly approached the capital, the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan came to kyoto from outside, but the imperial court internally slandered him as a traitor, and then was besieged by the Jin army, and had to move outside the city, but the magnates outside the city were worried that Yuan Chonghuan's army would cause damage to their own property, and complained to the imperial court, saying that Yuan Chonghuan's army burned and looted outside the city, resulting in the destruction of their own houses and fields.
The Chongzhen Emperor listened to the words of others and ordered Yuan Chonghuan to be sentenced to capital punishment, but fortunately, a righteous man surnamed She risked his life to steal his head and bury it in his backyard.
In order to guard Yuan Chonghuan's tomb, this righteous soldier surnamed She was in his hometown in Guangdong, and in order to guard Yuan Chonghuan's tomb, he made an ancestral training for future generations not to return to his hometown in Guangdong; he wanted to study, but he could not be an official; he had to guard Yuan Chonghuan's tomb for generations. The descendants of the She family have done it and have been following the ancestral precepts, and the She family has guarded the tomb of Yuan Chonghuan for more than three hundred years, after 17 generations.
Each generation learned the story of General Yuan Chonghuan from the mouths of the previous generation of tomb keepers, and each generation was loyal to their duties without complaint. The She family and Yuan Chonghuan are not related by blood, and it is really admirable that people who are not related by blood can achieve this level.
In the special historical environment, Yuan Chonghuan's tomb was once destroyed, in order to preserve Yuan Chonghuan's tomb, but also in order to honor the family training established by his ancestors, the people in the She family should guard the tomb for Yuan Chonghuan for generations, and the seventeenth generation of tomb keeper She Youzhi finally became a cultural relics protection unit in 1984.
Generation after generation of tomb keepers in the She family let us see the persistence, see the loyal subjects, and let people see that a family's good family style and family training will inevitably play an important role in future generations.