In December 1971, due to unsettled relations with the Soviet Union, the mainland began to build bomb shelters throughout the country to prevent a Soviet nuclear strike.
The 366 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army in Changsha city is also building an air raid shelter next to a mound near the Wuli Monument. At the beginning, people found that there were many white substances mixed in the soil, and when they dug more than twenty meters deep, they could not dig.
The leader of the team asked people to look into the situation, and the result was that the eyes that were punched out were constantly emitting gas. At this time, the leader was lighting a cigarette, and as a result, the open flame encountered gas and suddenly burned up rapidly. The crowd hurried out of the bomb shelter, and when they came out, the leader's eyebrows and hair were burned.
Ghost fires bubble up from the ground
What exactly did the construction team dig up? No one knows, but for the sake of safety, the news was uploaded layer by layer, from the president of the 366 Hospital to the headquarters of the military region.
The command believes that this will be a conspiracy secretly arranged by the enemy? So I sent sappers to investigate, and there was no answer. However, the locals gave a possibility that under these two mounds was a group of tombs.
It is recorded in ancient books that this is a tomb of two women, which is the tomb of Tang Erji, the burial of King Cheng of Hansha. However, there are also other ancient records, this is the tomb of Ma Yin, the king of Chu during the Five Dynasties period.
Some people also say that these two mounds form the shape of a saddle, so this is the saddle pile tomb, but in the legend, the saddle pile is rumored to be the horse king pile.
No matter whose tomb it was, no one knew what the situation was now, so the construction team called the Hunan Museum. At that time, the people in the museum went to the mountains and went to the countryside, and there were not many people.
But those left behind are some experienced old people, and their insight is very strong. For the situation described by the construction team, Deputy Director Hou Liang immediately understood that this was an ancient tomb, and it was likely that it had been destroyed by the construction team.
In fact, the museum is very clear that there is a Han tomb under this, but because the area is relatively well preserved, it has not been excavated. Now there is a "ghost fire", indicating that the tomb is no longer sealed, and the gas inside leaks to produce combustible gases.
Thinking that the tomb might be destroyed, Hou Liang was anxious at the time, and immediately took several guards to investigate overnight. Hou Liang borrowed an oxygen bag from the hospital, and he wanted to collect some of the gas that was spewing out, but he was one step too late, and the gas was no longer spewed out.
Later, it was thought that the reason why the things in this tomb were well preserved may be related to these gases, but now it can only be a pity.
After confirming that there is an ancient tomb below, some people think that it should be backfilled, but now that oxygen has been added to the tomb, backfilling has no meaning, and the most urgent thing at the moment is to carry out rescue excavations immediately. Soon the approval of the central government also came down, and on January 16, 1972, the excavation of the Mawangdui tomb officially began.
Lotus soup from two thousand years ago
A large ancient tomb was found in changsha, but the young people in the museum went to the countryside, and if they wanted to dig it with these left-behind elderly people in the museum, it is estimated that they could not dig it up in the Year of the Monkey. Therefore, they asked the local universities to assist in the excavation, which did greatly improve the efficiency of the excavation, and it took only four days to uncover the sealing layer.
However, at this time, three robbery caves appeared, which made the museum experts feel cold and half-cut, could it be that this ancient tomb of the Han Dynasty had been climbed by the tomb robbers? They then analyzed the caves, and one of them had a pair of pull-back shoes, which proved that the cave was dug by people during the Republic of China.
There is also a robbery cave, which finds oil lamps from the Tang Dynasty, which seems to have been dug by people during the Tang Dynasty. The third robbery hole is in the middle of the tomb, and this robbery hole almost dug into the main burial chamber, but fortunately, after somehow deflecting a little, to avoid the destruction of the tomb.
Before opening the main burial chamber, it is necessary to clean the hard white paste mud layer, the white paste mud layer of the ordinary tomb is only a thin layer, but this ancient tomb is 1.3 meters thick, which is really surprising. What is even more shocking is that in this layer of white paste mud, people have found some tender green leaves.
To know that this is an ancient tomb more than 2,000 years ago, these leaves can be preserved intact to the present, it is simply a miracle on earth. Then people continued to clean downwards, and charcoal and bamboo mats were cleared out. It is worth mentioning that the bamboo mats in this ancient tomb are as many as 26 floors, which shows the importance people attached to this ancient tomb at that time.
The rafters are made up of four huge pine planks, about 4 meters long and 1.5 meters high, and the heaviest pine planks can weigh more than 1,000 pounds. The excavators carefully removed the cover, and the chamber was divided into nine small spaces in the shape of a tic-tac-toe by four partitions, with the tomb owner's coffin in the middle, and the rest of the space filled with jewelry.
Even the leaves of the white plaster mud layer can reveal a tender green color, and these jewelry utensils are naturally like new, basically undamaged. It is worth mentioning that there has been a lot of water in the rafters, and salvaging these things is a technical job. Responsible for the salvage is an old man named Ren Quansheng, who was originally the legendary Changsha Tufuzi, that is, a tomb robber.
After liberation, many of these people were incorporated and became members of the archaeological team. In this excavation, these archaeologists who were transferred from Tufuzi made great efforts and made great contributions to the protection of cultural relics.
Thousands of objects have been excavated in the rafters, including silk fabrics, lacquerware, bamboo and wood, pottery, metal utensils, musical instruments, etc., as well as many specimens of animals and plants, all of which were buried with the owner of the tomb. In addition, there are a large number of bamboo janes and a seal, the seal is engraved with the words "concubine Xin Chai", proving the identity of the owner of this ancient tomb, which is the tomb of Lady Xin Chai.
Among all the funerary items, there is a vessel that attracts people's attention, because this vessel is still well preserved in a bowl of lotus soup, of which the lotus pieces are clearly visible. However, when the staff took the lotus slice soup, the lotus slices began to dissipate due to shaking. The photographer on the side was quick-eyed, and before the lotus film disappeared, he filmed this scene in time, leaving evidence for follow-up research.
Later, archaeologists studied this bowl of lotus soup, and they believed that the phenomenon of self-dissolution of lotus flakes is called fiber disintegration, because the seal is buried deep underground for 2000 years, as long as there is a slight vibration of the lotus flakes will disappear.
This also proves from the side that in the two-thousand-year-long history, the Changsha area has been very peaceful, and there has been no earthquake of more than three levels, otherwise this bowl of lotus soup would never have appeared in a perfect form.
Seeing the audience friends here, you may wish to give a thumbs up, and then we will look at the national treasure: Mrs. Xin Chai's clothes
Mrs. Xin Chai's clothes
After the tomb of Mawangdui was excavated, At that time, China and Japan also began to establish diplomatic relations. When the Japanese prime minister visited China, when he visited the Forbidden City, he saw the wet corpse Mrs. Xin Chai at a glance.
He then offered to give Mrs. Xin Chai to Japan as a state gift, but this request was rejected by the mainland. Later, the Japanese side proposed to ask for a hair of Mrs. Xin Chai, although it is not known what Japan wants Mrs. Xin Chai's hair to do, but this request is very strange when it sounds, so it is rejected by Premier Zhou. What is the charm of Mrs. Xin Chai that makes the Japanese so desperate to pursue?
Mrs. Xin Chai's coffin had four layers, which made the experts at the time very puzzled, because in ancient times, only the emperor used the four-layer coffin, what kind of social status did this Mrs. Xin Chai have? There is no way to explore this.
Then people opened Mrs. Xin Chai's four-story coffin, and finally saw Mrs. Xin Chai's real body, and the result was really unexpected. Because the body in the coffin is not a white bone, but a female corpse that has not decayed.
The female corpse was soaked in a liquid twenty centimeters deep, this female corpse was about 50 years old, about one meter and six meters tall, and later people restored the appearance of Mrs. Xin Chai through science and technology, and indeed a great beauty. The body of Mrs. Xin Chai has not decayed for two thousand years, and as soon as this news came out, it instantly caused a sensation in the world.
When the Japanese prime minister visited China, he wanted Mrs. Xin Chai, but later retreated to ask for hair. This is because Japan wants to study the antiseptic technology and wants to do genetic research on Mrs. Shinchai. However, the wet corpse of Mrs. Xin Chai is a precious treasure of the mainland, and naturally the Japanese cannot be manipulated, so they are strictly rejected by the mainland.
Mrs. Xin Chai is charming, and her clothes are also very magical, known as plain gauze shirts. The magic of this dress is not that it does not decay, but that it weighs.
This dress is 128 cm long and 190 cm long with sleeves, and consists of a top and a bottom. Such a large size of clothing, but only weighs 49 grams, a matchbox can hold it, can be described as "thin as a cicada wing" and "empty". Later, people tried to imitate one of these thin clothes, but the imitation of the clothes weighed 80 grams.
Experts are puzzled, and after ruling out all possibilities, they believe that the reason why they cannot be imitated is because the silkworms of two thousand years ago were thinner and thinner, and the silk they spit out was finer.
Today's silkworms are already relatively fat, and the silk is much thicker than before, which makes the plain gauze shirt unable to be copied. Later, experts spent more than a decade cultivating a skinny silkworm, so that they reproduced a 49.5-gram plain gauze jacket.
In fact, there were two plain gauze shirts excavated at that time, one weighing 48 grams and one weighing 49 grams, both of which were collected in the Hunan Provincial Museum. But in 1983, a young man named Xu Anti-Emperor went to the museum to steal, and in addition to stealing many valuable cultural relics, he also took away two plain gauze shirts.
After Emperor Xu returned home, his mother knew that her son had run into a catastrophe, so she threw some cultural relics to the park, mailed the other part back to the museum, and destroyed some part.
Among the cultural relics that were destroyed, the 48-gram plain gauze shirt was not spared, and since then there is only 49 grams of plain gauze cuff left in the world. The plain gauze shirt is one of the 64 national treasures that are forbidden to go abroad on the mainland, and it is a national first-class protected cultural relic.
Later, people found the tombs of her husband Li Cang and her children next to the tomb of Lady Xin Chai, but it is strange that in that era of male superiority and female inferiority, the tomb of Lady Xin Chai far exceeded that of Li Canghou and her children in terms of scale and etiquette. Why do you think that? Welcome to leave a message to discuss, we will see you in the next issue.