In the concept of the ancients, the topic of "death" has always been very avoidant. However, with the development of the times and the burst of new ideas, many people began to change this concept. Funeral methods are not only earth burial, but also cremation, tree burial, water burial and so on.
In ancient times, there was a funerary custom in the South, which was the burial of ship coffins.
A ship coffin, a type of burial tool, hollows out the whole wood and chisels it into the shape of a ship, and the person is buried inside. The coffins are placed in the form of hanging caves, mounted in trees and buried in the soil.
In ancient China, the southern water transport was developed, and there was a saying that "the northerners rode horses, and the southerners took the boat", and the coffin was buried, which means to take a leaf boat to the other shore. This is a kind of funeral custom prevalent by the ancient Bashu people, and at the same time, it is also a unique burial custom of some ethnic groups in China that live by the water and grow up in boats.
In the pre-Qin period, there were not many ethnic groups that used ship coffins, only the Bashu region was a fairly concentrated area of ship coffins in China. The ancients who lived on the rivers and seashores were good at shipbuilding and using boats. When they develop a sense of the soul, they fantasize about attaching real life to the world after death. Believing that the indispensable tools of production and life of the deceased were also needed in that world, there was a ship coffin.
"Sending souls" is an important part of the funeral customs of the ancestors of Bashu. The Benji of the King of Shu records that "Li Bing took Qin Shi as shu shou, called Wenshan Tianpeng Que, and called Tianpeng Gate. The cloud dead have learned of it, and the ghosts and spirits have seen it several times. ”
This statement seems nonsense today, but the Bashu people at that time believed it to be true.
According to historical records, the Shu people wanted to send the souls of the deceased to the birthplace of their ancestors, and the means of transportation for "sending souls" was the ship coffin.
So why is it only a popular funerary custom in the Prachuap Khiri Khan region?
First of all, this is closely related to the production and living customs of the ancestors of Bashu. Judging from the natural environment on which people live, the rivers and streams in the Sichuan Basin are densely packed. The pre-democracy of Bashu wanted to use the river as a communication line, which must rely on boats, so Bashu was one of the main areas where canoes were used in ancient China.
It is precisely because the ancestors of Bashu lived by the water, boats are indispensable to their production and life activities, and they have the belief of "taking the boat as their home", so it is natural to use the ship coffin as a burial tool after death.
At present, the shape and size of the boat coffins found are mostly the same as those used in the rivers and rivers now, so it can be determined that this funerary custom should be a projection of the ecological environment and water economic life of the near-water peoples in the ancient Bashu region.
In the 1950s, boat coffin burial cemeteries were discovered in Dongsunba and Guangyuan Zhaohua BaolunYuan in Ba County, Chongqing, and both were identified as Ba culture tombs.
In 1999, when rescuing cultural relics in the Three Gorges reservoir area, Chongqing Yunyang also found traces of canoe coffins. After the 1980s, ship coffins were also found in PengXian (present-day Pengzhou), Pujiang, Dayi, Guanghan, Mianzhu and other places, all with obvious Shu cultural characteristics.
The ship coffin excavated the most in Sichuan, and the ship coffin joint tomb excavated in Chengdu Commercial Street in 2000 is currently the largest, the most exquisite excavated artifacts, and the richest cultural connotation reflected.
According to historical documents, since ancient times, many ethnic groups in southern China have also had the custom of using boats as coffins. A large number of archaeological results not only confirm the documentary records, but also provide important physical materials for the study of such burial tools and burial customs.
Shu culture itself has a long history, and while colliding and blending with the Culture of the Central Plains, it is also developing independently and has a certain degree of independence. The custom of ship burial is also an indispensable part of contemporary research and investigation.
Ship coffin burial is not only popular in China's ancient Bashu region, there are also a large number of ship coffins in Fujian, the difference is that the ship coffins in Wuyi Mountain, Fujian are basically hanging on the cliffs, these ship coffins, also known as "hanging coffins", why the ancients buried the deceased ancestors in this way, it is another difficult mystery!
This article is from: "MysteriousLy Disappearing Treasure"