In 1974, an ancient tomb was discovered in the foothills near the county seat of Nanjing. The mausoleum was discovered because the place was used to expand a hospital.
During the excavation, the tomb was discovered, and when the Municipal Bureau of Cultural Relics immediately sent a team of experts to excavate the tomb. But the excavations stopped only halfway through, and then they filled the graves. It was thirty years later the grave was excavated again. After excavating the tomb, they may understand the structure of the mausoleum. The cemetery is about 15 meters long and the mausoleum area is about 60 square meters. This is not very big in the history of ancient tomb excavations. Disappointingly, some people have entered the tomb complex before the experts excavated. A search inside found nothing important. The mausoleum shows experts only a dozen jade bands, two gold rings and two porcelain bowls.
But fortunately, there is also information about the tomb owner, so we can identify the tomb owner. At that time, experts found two epitaphs in the tomb, namely "Xining Hou Song Cemetery Epitaph" and "Xianning Grand Princess Epitaph".
Princess Xianning was the fourth daughter of Ming Chengzu Zhu Di, and her mother, Empress Xu, was very fond of this daughter, and in February of the first year of Yongle (1403), she was crowned Princess xianning and married Song Ying, the Marquis of Xining. After marriage, they lived happily, but unfortunately Princess Xianning died of illness during the Orthodox years, leaving Song Ying alone to remember the deceased.
Ten years later, the Mongols invaded the Ming Dynasty, and Song Ying personally led the army to war. Later, he died in the war in Shanxi, and his children brought his father's bones back to his hometown and buried his parents together in their family graves. It was an ancient tomb we excavated in Nanjing.
Another major feature of this tomb is that it is very different from the excavated tombs. Although the couple was buried together, the two men were actually buried in two different graves.
Later experts gave us the answer, on the one hand, because the ancients always followed the difference between men and women, and on the other hand, because the two were married, so the reason for the joint burial was that they hoped that they could sleep together after death. When we come back to look at the tomb, we might wonder why it took 30 years to dig it. In fact, in the beginning, experts carried out the first excavation and found that there was a lot of water in the cemetery.
At the time we didn't know how deep the cemetery was and whether we could safely take steps to keep people safe. At that time, the coffins of the two of them were floating on the water. Experts later discovered that Princess Xianning's coffin had been floating for more than 600 years.
In desperation, experts had to abandon this excavation and fill the tomb. However, in order to protect cultural relics, we cannot ignore the mausoleum, so in 2004, under the leadership of archaeologists from Jiangsu Province, the mausoleum was explored again. At first, they pumped water out of the tomb, but to no avail. Later, after investigation, they had people dig mountains so that they could not prevent the water from returning to the graves.
Archaeological work has always been difficult, but there are always people who are not afraid of hardship, just to save what is extremely important to us. I hope that each of us should have a sense of cherishing artifacts so that we can protect those precious things.