During the Republic of China, Sun Dianying's theft of the imperial tomb shocked the world, so much so that later generations of textbooks specifically recorded this incident. An unknown local warlord actually dug up the tombs of the Qianlong Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty, provoking puyi who was on vacation in Tianjin to be angry, laying the groundwork for the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in the future.
Due to the lack of information on Sun Dianying's tomb robbery case, the reputation of Sun Dianying himself is very bad, so that when later generations evaluate this incident, it is inevitable to add vinegar and vinegar, adding a lot of speculation and legendary color, and some people on the Internet also say that Sun Dianying's 12 armies defiled Cixi and the like, and people shook their heads: Look at Cixi's photos, can you be interested?
Looking at the entire tomb robbery case, everyone seems to focus on the fishy, dirty, and colored tomb robbery, and ignored the legal trial after this, with the idleness of recent days, I sorted out sun Dianying's trial data after the tomb robbery case, trying to restore a real context.
How was sun dianying's tomb discovered?
Some people say that sun Dianying was exempt from legal punishment because he gave many gold and silver treasures from his mausoleum to Chiang Kai-shek and his cronies, which seems reasonable, but in fact it cannot withstand scrutiny.
1. The person in charge of the trial of the tomb robbery case in Tanglin at that time was a close associate of Yan Xishan, and the court was located in the area controlled by Yan Xishan, and it was not against Lao Jiang, and Sun Dianying wanted to pay bribes to Lao Yan.
Second, the time of the tomb robbery in Tanglin was 1928, when Chiang Kai-shek was not flattered by the outside world, and many warlords wanted to bring him down. Moreover, Sun Dianying launched the overthrow of Jiang in the subsequent Central Plains War, and he knew with his knees that he would not be courteous at this time. There are also many historical sources that indicate that Sun Dianying's gift of treasure occurred after 1930, that is, after the end of the judgment.
Sun Dianying robbed the tomb, ordering his own men to go down and steal, and he stayed in the base camp. When the troops left, many of the soldiers' shoes were stained with white ash, and the roads they walked also left gray marks, which were carefully noticed by nearby residents. Subsequently, nearby households found large excavated pits in Yuling and Dingdongling, and although the entrance to the cave was backfilled and camouflaged, the discerning people knew at a glance that this was the entrance to the underground palace opened by the tomb robbers. As a result, the news of the theft of Yuling and Dingdongling went away, and then there was the incident of local mountain people taking advantage of the chaos to enter the underground palace and steal treasures.
Originally, Sun Dianying's secrecy project was done well, and all the media were afraid of his obscenity and did not dare to report on this matter, but they did not expect Sun Dianying to threaten the local media in every way, but forgot to bribe foreign media. A month later, the British media "Reuters" revealed that the burial treasures of the Qianlong Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty appeared in the antique market, which was reported by domestic newspapers, and a stone stirred up thousands of waves.
On July 11, the Nationalist Government's Aftermath Investigation Team and the QingFu Detailed Investigation and Rehabilitation Group began to investigate, and after the conclusions of these investigations were disclosed, they once again caused an uproar in public opinion, and some Manchu merchant groups, as well as the Sunqing imperial family, including Puyi, who lived in the Japanese Concession in Tianjin, and other Manchus went to Chiang Kai-shek and demanded severe punishment. This incident caused a sensation throughout the country.
The ins and outs of the legal process
Under the pressure of strong public opinion, the supreme authorities decided to include the Tomb Robbery case in the judicial process as soon as possible. In view of the fact that the case involved a number of active military personnel and included senior generals, the authorities decided to set up an Army High Military Law Commission and Special Military Tribunal in Peiping to hear the case.
Because Sun Dianying himself was a soldier, the ordinary court could not hear it and had to be tried by military law, but because there were countless cases of military interference in legal judgments at that time, in order to ensure the fairness of the law, the Sunqing imperial family requested the formation of a "special court" specially established for the trial of particularly serious cases, and asked to participate in the jury. In the end, because Sun Dianying was involved in the interests of many political factions, the Nationalist government decided to organize the "High Military Law Tribunal" to hear the case.
Since Sun Dianying was robbing tombs in Beiping, it was managed by Yan Xishan, who was the commander-in-chief of the Beiping garrison, and instructed that the four group armies of Jiang, Feng, Yan, and Gui each elect a lieutenant general as a judge. The chief judge was General Shang Zhen, commander of the First Army of the 3rd Army and chairman of Hebei Province.
Shang Zhen was one of the few literary generals in the Jin Army who was proficient in law, and had a high degree of care in the case, and had repeatedly represented important military judicial positions in trials. The media was very concerned about the case, and the presiding judge, Shang Zhen, was full of confidence, and he wrote a "Notice of Anmin" to the press. He said: "The trial of the tomb robbery case is about three steps: the first step is to investigate the witnesses, the second step is to interrogate, and the third is to announce the verdict. His words were reasonable and reasonable, and many people who cared about this case were also full of confidence.
First of all, Shang Zhen's first step was to "investigate the witnesses", when the first witness to stand up and accuse Sun Dianying of being the main culprit was the tomb keeper and Jun of the Qing Mausoleum. He accused Sun Dianying of going to the scene of the tomb robbery and presiding over the sharing of the loot, but because the evidence was incomplete, and the witnesses could not even figure out the date sequence, He Jun insisted that he saw Sun Dianying blow up the mausoleum around June 20, but at that time Sun Dianying was still in his hometown of Tianjin, and the army would not really enter the Tanglin until July 4. All kinds of uncertainties have greatly reduced the number of witnesses and not accepted by the court.
However, things soon took a turn for the better, and the Shandong government captured a young deserter, Zhang Qihou, who boarded the ship with jewels stolen from the mausoleum and was arrested and interrogated on the spot for his strange behavior. And he himself was timid and afraid of things, and all of a sudden he put it all out:
I am 23 years old, from Suzhou, Anhui... Two or three days before the May Festival, the commander ordered the sapper battalion to use mines to blow up the second tomb of the Western Empress and the Qianlong Emperor. At that time, I did not go in, and the men of the commander of the army guarded the door, and the regiment, brigade, and battalion commanders went down to get things, and no one else was allowed to enter. They finished, and I didn't go until after dawn. I picked up these 36 beads in the grave of Empress Xi.
Zhang Qihou's confession is more of a reference nature, which is equivalent to acknowledging that the 12th Army did participate in the tomb robbery, and that the military commander Sun Dianying was the main envoy, and the human and material evidence was present, and the situation was very unfavorable to Sun Dianying.
The outcome of the trial
At this time, the testimony was over, and it was supposed to enter the second step, summoning Sun Dianying for interrogation, but at this moment, Shang Zhen's leading boss Yan Xishan called off the operation.
After the tomb robbery, the incident became an important point of contention between politics. The time of sun dianying's trial was in 1928, when the Northern Expedition unified the Central Plains, and although the bigwigs of all sides were superficially subordinate to Chiang Kai-shek, they were actually surging undercurrents. In order to control Northern China, Chiang Kai-shek declared that the Nationalist government would unify the military system and reduce the army.
Chiang Kai-shek's disarmament plan, however, consisted of laying down only others, not himself, and instead expanding the number of gendarme divisions by 10. Against such a backdrop, the warlords of Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, and Li Zongren decided to unite and find the right time to pull Chiang Kai-shek from power.
In such a big environment, the law that should be fair has been contaminated with the sludge of politics. Yan Xishan believed that with the current military strength, he and Chiang Kai-shek could only eat turtles in battle, and if he offended someone with heavy troops like Sun Dianying, it would only be more unfavorable in the future.
The chief judge Shang Zhen was constrained by his old boss Yan Xishan, and the military law trial he led could not be deepened, and finally the defendant was released, and the main culprits included Tan Wenjiang, Zhang Qihou, Zhang Dianyuan, officers and men of the 12th Army, as well as several antique merchants and Tanglin mausoleums, except for Sun Dianying, who was punished with non-prosecution.
As for Shang Zhen's second and third steps of "interrogation" and "announcement of public judgment", it is completely without the original confidence. During the military tribunal's first pre-trial at the Pingjin Garrison Headquarters, Tan Wenjiang insisted that the jewels he was holding were obtained by the bandits, did not admit to the tomb robbery, and did not confess to Sun Dianying. In the previous pre-trials of the military court, Sun Dianying did not appear in court, and there were no issues involving him in the court pre-trial, and everyone seemed to deliberately avoid mentioning his name.
After the pre-trial was over, Shang Zhen weighed it repeatedly and formed a formal judgment. From the news reports of that year, it can be seen that the judgment characterized the case as "the Zunhua County garrison colluded with the Shouling Manchus to steal stolen goods." This sentence is very interesting, first of all, he did not directly point to the garrison that engaged in tomb robbery is the 12th Army, only with a very vague sentence to bring it. In the verdict, the officers and men of the 12th Army were called "suspects" rather than "main criminals", and on June 15, the court-martial trial was submitted to the central government, and the Tanglin robbery case was hastily ended.
After the verdict was sent to the Military Justice Department of the Ministry of Military Affairs in Nanjing, there was no further news on this. In the face of such a hasty judgment, the judicial department has no intention of investigating, and with the mentality of "I am rotten", it will do as it is done, and Tan Wenjiang and others will be locked up.
Subsequently, the Central Plains War was full of wolves, and Sun Dianying led his troops to follow Yan Xishan to fight against Chiang Kai-shek's Central Army, and completely fell to the Yan, Feng, and Gui camps, because they were all in the same camp, no one pursued Sun Dianying whether he was involved in tomb robbery.
Conclusion: It has always been rumored that in order to calm the anger of the people, Sun Dianying gave the Longquan Sword to Chiang Kai-shek, the jade watermelon to Song Ziwen, and the Night Pearl to Song Meiling, and as a result, Sun Dianying escaped criminal responsibility. The popular saying comes from the memoirs of Lieutenant General Wen Qiang of the Nationalist Army. As far as he himself said, the reason why he would know about this matter was because Sun Dianying couldn't sleep one night and said it himself when he was chatting with Wen Qiang.
In fact, it was not that the law could not catch Sun Dianying, at that time, no one in the streets and alleys did not know that Sun Dianying was leading this matter, and even Sun Dianying himself did not shy away from showing off. This was the darkest place in China in the 20th century, where the judiciary became a blank cheque, unrestrained, sometimes even unannounced, and simply let it drag. Sun Dianying thus remained at large and lived until 1947, when he died of a recurrence of drug addiction.
The first tomb robber of the Republic of China escaped the punishment of the law so smoothly.
(End)