In fact, the tradition of tomb keepers has a long history, as early as the Qin Shi Huang period, the position of tomb keepers has been established. It is said that the descendants of Meng Tian who guarded the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang in later generations gradually disappeared due to the chaos of the war. So what happened to the imperial tombs of the Qing Dynasty?
After the Manchu Rulers entered the Customs, they actively studied the culture of the Central Plains, so many emperors began to choose tombs for themselves as soon as they came to power. The first emperor of the Qing Dynasty was Shunzhi, and the Xiaoling Tomb of the Shunzhi Emperor was built in the eighteenth year of Shunzhi, and it was also the first imperial tomb in the Eastern Qing Dynasty. Later, the Qing Tombs successively buried Kangxi's Empress Xiaochengren, Kangxi's grandmother Empress Xiaozhuang, Kangxi, Qianlong, Daoguang and other emperors.
During the Qing Dynasty, the Qing government set up special departments in the Shengjing Sanling, Qing Dongling, and Qingxi Tombs to manage these mausoleums, and also allocated special maintenance personnel and sacrifice personnel. In 1912, when the Qing government announced its retreat, the Provisional Government of Nanjing promised to send people to guard the Qing tombs. However, at that time, the situation was chaotic, and Puyi colluded with foreigners and attempted to restore, and relations with the Republic of China government were tense, so the troops who had originally guarded the Qing Tombs and the Qing Tombs were withdrawn, and the Qing Imperial Family could only guard the mausoleums themselves.
As the saying goes: This plan could not catch up with the change, the Shunzhi Emperor wanwan did not expect that the Qing Dongling, including the two (Shunzhi, Kangxi) who had just moved in, began to choose another mausoleum site, because when the Yongzheng Emperor chose the site of the Tomb for himself, he could not find the right one for him in the Qing Dongling, either feng shui was not good, or the soil quality of the land he liked was not good, and it was easy for the underground palace to enter the water, so he was fierce, and he began to find Yizhou in other land boundaries, and built his own mausoleum on a large scale, which was the QingXi Mausoleum.
Among them, the most obvious is that after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the Manchus entered the pass, although the two dynasties fought and killed for decades, but when the Qing Dynasty got Jiangshan, the first thing Dorgon did was to help Chongzhen rebuild the mausoleum and send special people to protect the Thirteen Tombs. In this way, the current Ming Dynasty mausoleum has been well preserved.
Many of the descendants of the tomb keepers do not know that their ancestors were tomb keepers. Even if they know something, they will not understand much, and in some important ancestral festivals, the descendants of these tomb keepers will not carry out large-scale sacrifices like their ancestors, but at most they will make some simple sacrifices according to the rituals of ancestor worship.
There are also some descendants of the tomb keepers who have also become new tomb keepers, of course, these are mainly some who have been planned as royal cemeteries, or cultural relics protection units, and the descendants of these people will carry out the work of their ancestors as a member of the maintenance and management of them.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the tomb keepers scattered in villages near the mausoleum, such as Yongling, Xiayingzi, and Jiahe. These places also became the last settlement villages of the Aisin Kyaw Lo clan. They ostensibly lived like the locals, but the story of the tomb keepers has been passed down from generation to generation. Some of them became the new tomb keepers - in the cultural relics protection unit, as a member of the maintenance management, to continue to complete the work of their ancestors.