On February 19, 2002, the eighth day of the first lunar month, just after the Spring Festival holiday, construction workers on the construction site of the Wuxi section of the Beijing-Shanghai Expressway have once again been engaged in intense construction. In order to save time, a construction team in charge of the bidding section of Hongshan Town in Wuxi City sent some construction machinery to take soil from a mound not far from the construction site. Amid the roar of bulldozers, the mound soon opened up a large chunk.
Hongshan is located in the eastern suburbs of Wuxi, and unlike the surrounding townships in the same Taihu Plain, Hongshan has hundreds of small mounds in its territory, which is also the origin of the town's name.
Rapidly getting smaller during construction is the Tiger Pier, which is 56 meters long and 43 meters wide, and it was once the largest of the Hongshan mounds. Just as the mound was about to disappear, two attentive villagers suddenly noticed that some broken porcelain pieces and small ceramic artifacts were revealed in the soil pushed by the bulldozer.
01 Villagers discover the tomb
Fortunately, the villagers, who have a sense of cultural relics protection, did not ignore this detail, but quickly packed the things they picked up in woven bags and sent them to the cultural relics department.
Pottery pieces dug out by villagers
The archaeologists were startled when they opened it, and the woven bag brought by the villagers not only contained some ceramic fragments, but also two relatively complete cultural relics, one of which was an ancient bell clock, and the other was a spherical bell-shaped artifact. Archaeologists have judged that these items should be artifacts from the Spring and Autumn Period.
Archaeologists sensed the seriousness of the situation and rushed to the scene. When they arrived at the scene, they found that the scene was messy, full of fragments of ceramics, covering an area of hundreds of square meters.
Could it be that such a huge tiger mound in front of you is actually an ancient tomb of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, so will other mounds with similar shapes also be similar ancient relics? In history, Wuxi in this period belonged to the sphere of influence of the State of Wu, so what level of Wu nobles would the owner of the tomb of the Tiger Dun be?
The archaeologists who inspected the site quickly reported to the Institute of Archaeology of the Nanjing Museum, and later applied to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage for rescue excavations.
02 Excavation of tiger piers
More than a month later, the Hongshan site archaeological team, which was approved by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and jointly composed of the Nanjing Museum and the Wuxi Xishan District Cultural Relics Management Office, officially entered the excavation site.
Debris from the site
At the tomb site, the archaeologists found that the tiger dun tomb that had been excavated by the excavator presented a slightly strange scene. Most of the ancient tombs of the same period were called earth pit wooden tombs, and the chambers where the owner of the burial tomb and the burial utensils were buried were buried deep in the ground, and the deepest one was twenty or thirty meters. However, after the destruction of the Tiger Dun Tomb Seal Mound, a large number of artifacts on the surface have been exposed.
Originally, in the Wuyue area, where rivers and lakes are dense and the groundwater level is shallow, from the Liangzhu culture period, which dates back more than 5300 years, the ancestors have a tradition of building tombs on the ground and then building tall mounds on the tombs.
Seal the mound
In today's form of burial similar to this without digging a grave, the flat pile of earth is called a mound tomb, mainly distributed in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions, most of which belong to the historical Wu and Yue kingdoms.
According to historical records, in the eleventh century BC, Taibo, the eldest son of King Tai of Zhou, led his people from Shaanxi all the way to Meili near Hongshan and established an ancient civilization called the State of Wu. From its rise to its demise, the Kingdom of Wu has been handed down for 24 generations. But where exactly these kings are buried has long been explored by the archaeological community.
During the Spring and Autumn Period, the two countries of Wu and Yue were one fixed in today's Suzhou, and the other was centered on Shaoxing. Although the conquest was endless and the border was often changed, most of the time the Qiantang River was used as the natural boundary. The Taihu Lake Basin, where the town of Hongshan is located, has been at the heart of Wu rule.
The small Hongshan Mountain is not only close to the source of the Wu Kingdom's territorial expansion, but also less than 20 kilometers away from the Huqiu Sword Pond, which is said to be the tomb of King Wu.
Today, more than fifty Eastern Zhou tombs found in Hongshan, such as the tiger pier with a diameter of tens of meters, are quite numerous, and after checking and analyzing more than fifty mound tombs one by one, the joint archaeological team delineated the first excavation targets.
Excavation site floor plan
In addition to cleaning up the damaged tiger mounds, they will also excavate seven more densely distributed mound tombs. The seven mound tombs vary in shape and size. In addition to large, medium and small tombs, there is even a very large tomb called Qiu Chengdun that is far larger than the tiger mound that is already a large tomb.
After the official excavations began, the archaeological team first carried out a thorough cleanup of the tiger mound, and when the damaged burial chamber fill was uncovered layer by layer, some artifacts were exposed.
Among the primitive celadon and geometric hard pottery excavated from Tiger Dun, there are 150 pieces of ceremonial vessels, as well as 150 pieces of musical instruments and a number of jade objects. The Tiger Dun Tomb unearthed a large number of precious cultural relics, but unfortunately there is no text on the artifact, so it is naturally a bit hasty to make conclusions about the tomb based on the shape of the artifact.
After extracting a wealth of cultural relics, the archaeological team decided to send some samples suitable for testing to the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, planning to accurately determine the age of the tomb by carbon 14 dating. They hope that accurate dating for tombs where no inscriptions have been found will help solve the mystery.
03 Clean up small tombs
The work on tiger pier came to an end, and the archaeological team began to clean up two small tombs, namely tomb No. 2 and Zou Jiadun, tomb No. 4.
When excavating the old tomb mounds, the team members found many civilian tombs in the Ming Dynasty, and their cleanup was seriously delayed in the excavation progress, but at the same time, the excavation of Zhoujiadun was unusually smooth.
Zhou Jiadun is the smallest of the 7 newly excavated mound tombs, with a pit length of only about 4 meters, far smaller than the large tombs such as Tiger Dun and Qiu Chengdun, which are tens of meters long.
But surprisingly, at the Zou Jiadun tomb, the archaeologists extracted more than fifty artifacts from the simple burial chamber, including six pieces of jade that could only be used by nobles, including jade dragons, jade dragons, jade dragons, and jade turtles. The harvest of Zou Jiadun made the archaeologists feel excited. Although the question of the genus and rank of the tomb has not been resolved, there are still so many mounds waiting to be excavated.
After the success of Zou Jiadun, the excavation of the old tomb finally entered the burial chamber stage. Similar to Zou Jiadun, the tomb did not experience theft, and dozens of excavated artifacts also have jade objects that symbolize aristocratic status. The harvest of two small mound tombs proves that the mound tombs in the Hongshan Cemetery have a certain hierarchical status. In this way, there may really be a large tomb that belongs to the Wu state monarch.
Sure enough, the next 4 small and medium-sized mound tombs have been harvested, not only jade, but also bronze-like celadon celadon bottles and bean plates and other ceremonial instruments and musical instruments such as bells, hammers, hammers, and duos. The largest number of cultural relics unearthed, the largest variety and the highest grade are also the No. 1 Tomb Tiger Pier.
04 Tomb dating
Carbon-14 testing in Beijing also had accurate data at this time, and the age of the mound tombs represented by tiger mounds was finally limited to between 474 BC and 468 BC. Even the test samples taken in some later tombs are not out of this range.
A cemetery of this size was formed in such a short period of time. In this period of time in the history of Wuyue, a major event occurred. The Yue king, who had been defeated by wu and humiliated by imprisonment, was determined to take revenge. After being released by Wu WangFuchai and returning to China, after ten years of recuperation, he regrouped and was determined to make another life-and-death contest with the Wu Kingdom, which was not intended to go north to compete for hegemony.
In the winter of 473 BC, when the Vietnamese army, under the command of the general Fan Li, took advantage of the main force of the Wu army to attack Qi Chu, in one fell swoop, it broke through the defensively empty capital of the Wu state, Gu Su, forcing Wu Wangfu to resist so weakly that he finally committed suicide with hatred, and the foundation of the Wu state that lasted for seven hundred years was destroyed.
Originally, the Hongshan Mound Tombs near Wudu were built on the day of the completion of the Wuguo Society. The Hongshan Cemetery, located at the heart of the State of Wu, is likely to belong to the State of Yue, a hostile force in the State of Wu.
Although a large number of precious cultural relics have been excavated from seven large and small mound tombs, none of them can provide direct evidence of the genus.
In the past, people distinguished the clans of tombs first from the tomb shape system to make a judgment, but from the previous excavation experience, the tombs of Wuyue and Yue were basically mound tombs with similar shapes, and the tomb shape system could not provide a basis.
The cultures of Wuyue and Yue are of the same origin and the shape of the instruments are close, so the primitive celadon ceremonial instruments excavated from the Hongshan Cemetery are very common in the Yue tombs around Shaoxing, Zhejiang.
Wu and Yue were relatively close to the Central Plains, and after defeating the Yue Kingdom and believing that they had solved their worries, Wu Wang Fuchai began to actively participate in the Central Plains hegemony. The reason why the State of Wu was defeated by the Yue King Gou Jian was precisely because Fu Cha led a heavy army to participate in the Huangchi Hui Alliance, which promoted the overlord, and tried to ascend to the throne of the co-lord of the world.
Long-term battles and exchanges allowed the Wu state to absorb the Central Plains culture to a greater extent, so bronze ceremonial vessels with the characteristics of the Central Plains occasionally appeared in the tombs of the Wu nobles. However, none of the seven tombs cleared in Hongshan have unearthed bronze ceremonial vessels, so the archaeological team temporarily judged the clan of the cemetery to be Yueguo.
The upper limit of the burial age is 474 BC, and the next year the Wu kingdom will perish. At the time of the fall of the country, there were indeed many nobles who fought to the death. However, in such an environment, Wu Guo was no longer able to build such a huge tomb community for his subjects, and eventually people judged that the Hongshan cemetery belonged to the Yue Kingdom.
The family problem is solved, but the identity of the owner of the tomb remains a mystery. In the 7 mound tombs that have been excavated and cleaned, although the celadon burial utensils are quite abundant, no ancient tomb has any written information. So the archaeologists can only pin their hopes on the excavation of Qiu Chengdun, the largest mound in the entire cemetery, where they hope to preserve more information from ancient times.
05 Excavation of the tomb Qiu Chengdun
The remaining seal soil of Qiu Chengdun is rectangular, 78.6 meters long, 50.8 meters wide and 5.4 meters high, which is the largest single tomb in Hongshan Cemetery.
The only one that can surpass it in scale is the Tomb of King Yinshanyue in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, so people once suspected that it was the tomb of the king who could not be found.
According to the information obtained by drilling, Qiu Chengdun is different from the previous mound tombs that have been sealed from the flat ground, and it is completely modeled on the tomb shape of the Nobles of the Central Plains, and is a vertical pit tomb with a Chinese character structure.
After nearly 2,500 years of wind and rain, the remaining Qiu Chengdun still retains a volume of more than 20,000 cubic meters. The low-lying Taihu Lake Plain is spectacular. Exploration shows that this large tomb not only adopts the original burial system of vertical pits, but also presents a zigzag structure of the princely hierarchy.
Since the 7 ancient tombs that have been cleaned and excavated before are all distributed on mounds with loose seals on the surface of the tomb, people expect that the tomb chamber of Qiu Chengdun, which is buried deep underground, can preserve more abundant ancient information.
On the morning of April 8, 2003, just when the team members were cleaning the grave and filling the grave passage layer by layer in the hope of discovering the existence of the tomb chamber earlier, a team member suddenly found an area with abnormal soil color in the east of the middle of the tomb, and the archaeology team judged that this should be a robbery hole. Then, during the process of filling and cleaning, similar robbery holes appeared again and again, eventually as many as four, and the location was concentrated in the eastern half of the main burial chamber, which happened to be the location of the owner of the tomb in the same kind of tomb.
In an increasingly dreary atmosphere, the filling cleanup continued. When the excavation depth reached 2.5 meters, less than 1 meter from the bottom of the pit, the two robbery holes suddenly disappeared completely. Although the number of pirate caves has decreased by two, it is found that the situation is still not optimistic. Because until this moment, no trace of burial utensils and burial items has been found.
Although the continued downward cleaning of the burial chamber has not yet progressed, the west side of the tomb gave the archaeologists an unexpected surprise, and found a large number of celadon ceremonial and practical utensils nearly a thousand pieces. This scale is unprecedented in the archaeological excavations of Yueguo tombs in Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
In this space of less than 12 meters and only 3.2 meters in length and width, a large patch of original celadon was exposed in the fill.
In addition to the excavation of ceremonial utensils such as dings, beans, and pots that represent lilly, a large number of practical utensils have also appeared, of which hundreds of hard clay pots of about 1 meter high have appeared, and there have also been drainers, ice wine vessels, and wine warmers that have never been found before, which once again proves that the identity of the owner of this tomb is very noble.
It turned out that the narrow space excavated by the archaeologists was not a tomb at all, but a tomb similar to a warehouse for posterity. Nearly a thousand artifacts stacked together is spectacular, but the tomb structure with front and back chambers did not appear in large numbers until the middle of the Han Dynasty, which is why the back chamber was mistaken for a tomb passage in the first place.
In the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the tombs of the nobility continued the tradition of earth pits and wooden rafters in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, and it was only in some high-grade tombs that the boxy rafters were divided into multiple spaces. The unexpected discovery in the back room gave the archaeologists a sigh of relief.
Although the original porcelain is the most excavated artifact in the entire Hongshan cemetery, the appearance of these porcelains will not only help to judge the identity of the owner of the tomb, but also prove that the tomb has been stolen many times and has not been stolen and excavated, and the hard work of the archaeologists for several days will not be in vain.
The two remaining holes in the main burial chamber fill converged as they approached the bottom of the pit and began to expand in all directions. For some reason, the robbery hole did not extend far before it stopped. The archaeologists determined that the tomb must have been stolen but the scope of the theft was small, so a large number of burial items should still be intact in the burial chamber but have not yet been found.
The excavation of the main burial chamber of Qiu Chengdun is close to the bottom of the tomb, but no burial tools or bones that should be higher than the ground have been found, and the atmosphere at the scene has become more and more dull. Just then, a member of the team who was clearing the last layer of silt found fragments of broken artifacts.
In the damp dirt where the burial utensils were supposed to be placed, some fragments of broken artifacts were suddenly exposed, and some small jade objects were scattered around. These fragments should be primitive celadon porcelain, but the enamel on its surface is crystal clear and colorful, and it is difficult for people to judge what kind of artifact it is for a while.
After carefully extracting all the fragments, the archaeologists worked the site, and an exciting archaeological discovery finally swept away the haze of the site. It turned out to be a hollow ball-shaped object that we can see now with eight snakes coiled up.
The shape of this artifact is a bit peculiar, from the shape of it is eight living snakes intertwined and coiled together, and the middle forms a hollow spherical shape, and its appearance is decorated with very beautiful glass. Therefore, it was named glass glaze plate snake linglong ball. This delicate ball represents a kind of worship of the image of the snake in the Yue culture, which has religious significance and reflects a cultural phenomenon in the field of human ideology.
According to the literature, Gou Jian tried to be bold, eager for change, and often asked for advice from talents such as Fan Li and Wen Zhi on the issue of religious belief. Some historians have proposed that as a religious artifact, the greatest possibility of the owner of the Linglong ball is not the language but the overlooked Fan Li.
Fan Li was erudite but could not serve in his hometown of Chu because he was born poor, so he defected to the yue kingdom, which was thirsty for talents. Before he offered advice and assistance to king Yue, his identity was precisely that of a Taoist scholar. Therefore, there are many records in the "Records of History", "Wu Yue Chunqiu" and other documents that he used Taoist doctrine to influence Gou Jian and the subjects of the Yue Kingdom.
However, the beautiful story of Fan Li and Xi Shi's retreat together was widely circulated, how could he die soon after the destruction of Wu and be buried in the State of Wu? A closer look at the historical data turns out that most of these stories originated from the interpretation of the Literati of the Ming Dynasty.
During this period, the love legend of Fan Li Xishi was widely seen in notes, scripts and dramas, what was the real ending of Fan Li's life? In the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, the famous literary scholar Jia Yi made the "New Book of Ear Paralysis" in which there is such a passage as follows: "Shi Ji Gongcheng, Fan Li bore the stone and followed the Five Lakes, the Doctor's breed led the Xie Room Canal like a car cracking back to the spring", the meaning is very clear, Fan Li's ending is similar to the literary type is not to raft the Five Lakes, but to jump to the Five Lakes and die after tying up stones.
In this way, the possibility that the owner of the tomb is Fan Li has been recognized by more scholars. After the discovery of the precious glass glazed plate snake exquisite ball, the precious artifacts in the last layer of soil at the bottom of the main burial chamber pit followed, and important discoveries emerged one after another, jade flying phoenix, snake-shaped hook, jade covering, and double dragon pipe-shaped vessel are all very rare and exquisite jade objects in recent archaeological excavations.
After several days of meticulous cleaning, although the bones and burial tools of the tomb owner could not be found in the main burial chamber, a large number of important artifacts that should belong to the close burial were excavated one after another.
06 Epilogue
After the completion of the cleanup, the excavation is said to have ended, but the archaeologists always have a regret in their hearts, that is, no musical instruments have been found in this high-standard tomb. It is reasonable to say that there must be chimes representing the identity level of the tomb owner in the spring and autumn tomb chambers of this kind of prince and monarch level, but the excavations are about to end and no trace of musical instruments has been found.
Although this tomb was once stolen and disturbed, there is no reason for the tomb robbers to put all kinds of jade and celadon in the tomb chamber and not steal them, but to steal a piece of musical instruments, which must be strange.
After slowly searching for the sacrifice of the heavens, the archaeologists finally found a trace of signs in the place where the tomb and the tomb wall intersected, and the color of the soil was a little different.
The team members noticed that there seemed to be a hidden space in one corner of the burial chamber. After cleaning up a little, it was like opening a treasure trove. It turned out to be an alcove full of musical instruments. Judging from the results of the cleanup, there are more than 140 pieces of chimes, chimes, etc. of various kinds.
It turns out that this complex tomb not only rarely separates the front chamber and the back room, but also hides an alcove in the corner of the front chamber. The discovery of the tomb niches and a large number of musical instruments finally brought the excavation of Qiu Chengdun's tomb to an end.
At this time, people realized how lucky Qiu Chengdun's tomb was, and when the first robbery occurred, the tomb robbers entered the tomb chamber and expanded the robbery hole around, and soon after for some reason, it suddenly terminated. Later tomb robbers in the process of tomb robbery because they found the robbery hole of the predecessors, mistakenly thought that the tomb had been plundered, and finally chose to give up. What is rare is that such luck happens again and again, and the tomb is able to escape malice.
In the Hongshan Cemetery, especially above the Qiu Chengdun Tomb, there is now a modern building "Hongshan Site Museum". Regarding the owner of the tomb, whether it is Fan Li or Wen Zhi, it does not really matter. What is important is that the history of Gou Jian and Wu Li, who was determined to destroy Wu, Fan Li and Wen Zhi contributed their ideas and finally hid their bows and bows through this mound tomb, across time and space, and vividly placed in front of the world.