In the second half of 2014, the liaoning provincial case-handling personnel found a man a little strange during the investigation. He wears gold-rimmed glasses and is neatly dressed in a neat and elegant manner, but he seems to have a special interest in climbing mountains. He would run around the nearby mountain without a problem, sometimes it was a day, and no one could tell what he was doing on the mountain. This strange move aroused the suspicion of investigators, who knew about archaeology, ancient tombs, and tomb robbery at that time.
The man's behavior is not like a general tourist, more like a tomb robbery, which is not a good investigation. It turned out that the man's name was Yao Yuzhong, the main culprit of the largest tomb robbery case since the founding of New China, the top master and big brother in the tomb robbery industry. Yao Yuzhong, born in 1962, is a native of Ningcheng County, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Although he only has a primary school education, he especially likes to read books and can watch the sky. According to the position of the star bucket and the compass in his hand, the location of a tomb can be determined within a hundred miles, and it is transmitted to the gods in the circle.
Yao Yuzhong's unique skills in watching feng shui and tombs were passed on to him by his father, who was also a master tomb robber. And Yao Yuzhong usually likes to study books, and his ability is to go to a higher level in the experience accumulated by his father, thus becoming the "grandfather" and "the first master of Guanwai" in the tomb robbery world. At the time of his arrest, he had been robbing the tomb for thirty years, and most of them stepped on the spot alone during the day and led the gang members to carry out excavations at night. He and his gang do not use a Luoyang shovel, but a homemade tool called "Zazi", which is more performant than the Luoyang shovel.
Digging into the soil and pulling it out, you can tell if there are tombs in the ground by observing the change in the color of the soil. In addition, tools such as compass instruments, metal detectors, and three-dimensional imagers were also used, and the crime sites were personally selected by Yao Yuzhong. As long as it is the land he identified, he must dig up something before he is willing to give up, so he often digs the same place multiple times. This was also the reason why he later aroused suspicion and was arrested, accumulating that Yao Yuzhong had stolen at least two hundred ancient tombs in thirty years.
The value of the stolen cultural relics is unimaginable, and it is compared with his brother. Yao Yuzhong's younger brother, Yao Yufei, did not get the true transmission of his brother, but only learned some fur with his eldest brother. You can steal expensive cultural relics, such as Gou Yun Pei, horseshoe tubes, jade bracelets, etc., and learn a little fur. You can imagine how clever Yao Yuzhong's technology is, so he never has to worry about his life expenses. He is addicted to gambling, winning and losing in millions of yuan is a common thing, and even once reached tens of millions of yuan.
The objects he plays with in his hands are also rare among ordinary people, and there are no shortage of precious cultural relics such as Hongshan Jade Bi, which are luxuriously dressed. There are high-end hotels in and out, and there is a luxury villa in Chifeng, and when it was arrested, many cultural relics were found in its mansion. Valuable bronzes, wrenches, red agate beads, etc., any one taken out, are all national cultural relics. In addition, the cultural relics that Yao Yuzhong had sold were also very amazing.
In June 2012, he sold a pair of jade bracelets to Tian for 60,000 yuan, which was identified as a first-class cultural relics excavated from the Neolithic era. In February 2014, Yao Yuzhong mortgaged eight pieces of jade from the Hongshan period to Zhang in the name of borrowing 300,000 yuan, including six first-class excavated cultural relics. In August and November 2014, he twice instructed gang members to rob and kidnap the cultural relics in Feng's hands, at least 11 pieces of Hongshan jade cultural relics.
And these are just the tip of the iceberg, Yao Yuzhong's frequency of crimes is very high, 200 ancient tombs or gang crimes. He went alone to a few that no one knows, perhaps because of the confidence given by the tomb robbery technology, and he also looked down on the archaeologists a little. But no matter what, no matter how clever the technology, his behavior is also against the law. Repeated acts of privately excavating ancient cultural sites and tombs with historical, artistic and scientific value protected by the state constitute the crime of excavating ancient cultural sites and ancient tombs;
Among them, the court found that he participated in the excavation of ancient cultural sites 11 times and the excavation of ancient tombs 16 times, three of which were identified as national key cultural relics protection units. In addition, it was determined that Yao Yuzhong gathered others to excavate a total of 18 places, of which 16 were stone tombs in the Hongshan cultural period. For the purpose of illegal possession, instructing others to jointly rob others of property by violent means constitutes the crime of robbery. For the purpose of making profits, reselling cultural relics prohibited by the State on their own or by helping others constitutes the crime of reselling cultural relics.
According to Article 263 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China, whoever commits the crime of robbery shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than ten years and shall also be fined; Article 328 stipulates that whoever commits the crime of excavating ancient cultural sites or ancient tombs shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than 10 years, life imprisonment, and shall also be fined or have his property confiscated; Article 326 stipulates that if the circumstances of the crime of reselling cultural relics are particularly serious, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years but not more than ten years and shall also be fined.
The Intermediate People's Court of Chaoyang City, Liaoning Province, decided to sentence Yao Yuzhong to death with a two-year suspension of execution. On October 17, 2017, the Liaoning Higher People's Court rendered a final judgment upholding the first-instance judgment. As the main offender, Yao Yuzhong was punished for several crimes and decided to carry out the death penalty with a two-year suspension of execution.