Historically, the theft of ancient imperial tombs in China is not a rare thing, but the Ming Dynasty imperial tombs have been preserved intact, only the SiLing was stolen during the Republic of China, and there is a part of the wood and stone used by the Qing Emperor when building a mausoleum for himself, but today I want to talk about not the Ming Tombs, but a Ming Dynasty emperor tomb found in Hubei, unearthed 700 rare gems, experts: enough to buy an island country. In 2001, near Dahong Village, Changtan Town, Zhongxiang, Hubei Province, there were thieves trying to blow up an ancient tomb with explosives, and the Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology inquired and immediately came to carry out rescue excavations of this ancient tomb.
Zhu Zhan'an was the ninth son of Emperor Mingrenzong Zhu Gaozi, who was enfeoffed as the King of Liang in the 20th year of Yongle (1424) and the state of Luzhou (present-day Zhongxiang, Hubei), according to the History of Ming: "At the beginning of Xuande, the five kings of Zheng, Yue, Xiang, Jing, and Huai were given 50,000 yuan, but Liang Beizhi. In the sixth year of orthodoxy (1441), Zhu Zhanyuan died of illness and was buried in the original land of Neiyuping Mountain.
The tombs of princes in the Ming Dynasty were high-grade tombs, usually built with drainage systems, but archaeologists found that there was no drainage system in the tomb of Zhu Zhanyuan, the king of Liangzhuang, instead, the burial chamber was built in a place where groundwater could be seen, which experts speculated was related to the superstitious saying at that time that "do not reach the Yellow Spring and do not give up".
To the surprise of archaeologists, more than 5,300 pieces of gold, jade, porcelain, etc. have been excavated from zhu Zhan'an's tomb, and more than 700 gemstones have been inlaid with various cultural relics, which is the highest grade among the tombs of Ming Dynasty princes that have been excavated in China.
After studying the jewels inlaid in the ornaments in the tomb of King Liangzhuang, experts determined that these gems were all gems brought back by Zheng He when he went to the West, and Ma Huan, a ming dynasty generalist, followed Zheng He to the West three times, and recorded the shipping routes, politics, humanities, and crafts of the twenty countries that he personally experienced when he went to the West in the "Yingya Shengguan", which also recorded that Zheng He's fleet purchased a large number of jewelry in the Western Ocean.
Before the tomb of King Liangzhuang was unearthed, people only knew that Zheng He brought back a lot of jewelry when he went to the West, but it is not known what these jewels looked like, and the jewelry in the tomb of King Liangzhuang opened a layer of history, and was identified by the Chinese Geological Expert Group that the rubies, sapphires, emeralds and emeralds in the cultural relics excavated from the tomb of King Liangzhuang were four precious gemstones, all from Southeast Asia.
Among them, the gold-encrusted gemstone hat, the top hat is inlaid with a sapphire of about 200 carats, which is the largest sapphire found in the world so far; and the richness and exquisiteness of the burial items in zhu Zhan'an's tomb are second only to the Ming Tombs Dingling Tombs.