The Song Dynasty was a rich dynasty, and this is the consensus of everyone. But this dynasty is also very tragic, especially the fate of the emperor is even more lamentable, such as Song Huizong and Song Qinzong directly became prisoners, suffered humiliation, and finally died in a foreign country. In the history of the Song Dynasty, after the death of an emperor, the head was directly made into a wine cup, which was played by the elite of the Yuan Dynasty for nearly a hundred years, and finally Zhu Yuanzhang took it back and buried it.
This emperor was Zhao Yun, the fifth emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty. How did the head of an emperor become a drinking vessel? Everything should start with the evil monk Yang Lian Zhenjia. In 1277, He was appointed by Kublai Khan as the president of the Shu sect in Jiangnan, where he was in charge of Buddhist affairs in the Jiangnan region.
From the moment he assumed this position, Yang Zhenjia had already set his sights on the tomb of Song Lizong, that is, the Yongmu Mausoleum located on The Palace Mountain in Fusheng Town, Shaoxing City. Emperor Lizong of Song was the longest-reigning emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty, lasting 40 years, and in his later years he was absurd, and after his death, he brought a large number of funerary goods into the ground. As soon as Yang Lian Zhenjia came to Jiangnan, he went straight to the Yongmu Tomb and stole the funerary goods.
After Yang Zhenjia opened the coffin, he found that the body of Song Lizong, who had been soaked in mercury, was well preserved, so he hung the body of Song Lizong upside down on the tree in front of the mausoleum and drained the mercury. When Yang Zhenjia left, in view of the large size of Song Lizong's head, he cut it off and took it away. After Yang Zhenjia brought the head back, he played with it every day, and soon he ordered the craftsmen to polish the head, inlaid with gold and silver jewelry, and made it into a beautiful wine glass.
This skull wine glass was in the hands of Yang Zhenjia for 6 years. The emperor's skull was not something that could be played with casually, and in the first month of 1291, Yang Zhenjia was executed for his involvement in the "Sango Case". When the imperial court raided yang Zhenjia's mansion, it found this skull wine cup, and after that, the wine cup flowed through the yuan court elite and eventually fell into the hands of the emperor.
Just when everyone thought that Song Lizong's skull could no longer be found, there seemed to be an arrangement in the darkness, and Zhu Yuanzhang was born out of nowhere. In October of the 27th year of the Yuan Dynasty (1367), Zhu Yuanzhang sent Xu Da to lead a large army to the Northern Expedition, and the following year the army invaded the Capital of Yuan. When the news reached Nanjing, Wei Su, a famous historian of the Yuan Dynasty and a scholar of Hanlin at the time, was so distraught that he prepared to commit suicide by throwing himself into a well at Bao'en Temple, but was dissuaded by the monks.
The monk said to Wei Su, "The history of the country is unknown to the public. Public death is also the history of the death of the country. Wei Su chose to bear the burden of humiliation, surrendered to Xu Da, and was sent to Nanjing. Zhu Yuanzhang learned that Wei Su was coming, so he summoned him, and during the conversation between the two, Wei Su revealed a message to Zhu Yuanzhang that he had seen Song Lizong's skull wine vessel at the Yuan court banquet that year.
The history books record that when Zhu Yuanzhang learned of this news, He immediately searched for Xu Da and finally found the skull of Song Lizong in the Imperial Palace of the Yuan Capital. After Zhu Yuanzhang learned the news, he "sighed for a long time." Zhu Yuanzhang said to Wei Su, "Song Nandu's princes have no great loss of morality, and they have no feud with Yuan, and Yuan takes advantage of his weakness to take advantage of it. Zhu Yuanzhang was very sympathetic to Song Lizong, and first buried his skull in Nanjing, and a year later he was buried at the site of the Yongmu Mausoleum in Shaoxing.
References: History of the Song Dynasty, Records of Ming Taizu