Hanging coffin, one of the funerary methods of some minority ethnic groups in southern China, belongs to a kind of cliff burial, the most famous use of hanging coffins, is the ancient southwest area of the servants, so these hanging coffins are also called "hanging coffins".
In addition, similar customs exist widely in The Wuyi Mountains, Jiangxi, Hunan, and even the Pacific Region of Fujian.
However, why did these people in ancient times put coffins on the cliffs, and thousands of years ago, when technology was backward, how did people put hundreds of pounds of heavy coffins on them?
In ancient times, human beings did not have the concept of funery, but with the emergence of primitive worship in the Stone Age, funeral customs also gradually emerged, in addition to earth burial, cremation, there are water burial, wind burial, sky burial, etc., a variety of genres.
In the Yangtze River Basin in the southwest inland, there is a more alternative funeral custom, that is, cliff burial, they will also use coffins to hold the deceased, but they are not the coffin into the ground, but placed on the cliff cliff, and this "hanging coffin burial" cliff burial customs, in fact, also belong to the wind burial.
Usually, the hanging coffin is placed on the cliff facing the water, or the coffin is placed in a natural cave on the cliff, or placed in a man-made cave, or piled on the cliff and put the coffin on it.
Hanging coffins are not only distributed in our country's western and southeastern Sichuan, but also in Ryukyu, Southeast Asia's Malay Islands and Polynesian Islands, and other places, there are similar customs.
On the whole, the location of the hanging coffin is often a cliff facing the water, and the oldest known hanging coffin is the Wuyi hanging coffin in Wuyi Mountain, Fujian Province, which is the remnant of the end of the Shang Dynasty, and the existing hanging coffins in Sichuan and other places are almost all the ming dynasty period, and in this period, the hanging coffin customs in the world have basically disappeared.
Judging from the age of the hanging coffins that have been found in various places, such customs are mainly spread in the coastal areas to the inland, so there are views that this is the Vietnamese custom of the ancient southeast land, which was introduced to the inland with the migration of the Vietnamese.
The hanging coffins that have been found now, whether in the southeast or inland in the southwest, often weigh hundreds of pounds, and the coffins in Jiangxi and Fujian are mostly made of single giant wood, which is very heavy.
This is the strangest place of the hanging coffin, not to mention that thousands of years ago, even in modern times, it is not easy to put such a heavy coffin on the cliff of tens of meters or hundreds of meters, Jiangxi and other places have been widely rewarded, from all walks of life to solve the mystery of the hanging coffin methods, the result of a variety of strange methods.
The main one is the method of piling up soil and the method of walking water, that is, using the mound of soil to pile up to the mouth of the cave, putting the coffin and then removing the pile of soil, or waiting for the water level to rise to put the coffin into the mouth of the cave, but both methods have been overturned.
After much discussion and research, although there is no conclusive evidence, the main theory is the hanging method, that is, the coffin is transported to the top of the cliff, and then the coffin is trapped with a rope and placed on the cliff.
But this method also has flaws that cannot be explained, because the coffins found in Wuyishan and other places, some weighing thousands of pounds, are made of whole nan wood, and there is no way up the cliffs where they are located, even if it is difficult to do it with modern machinery, how the ancients sent the giant coffin up is still a mystery.
Because of this, until now, how the hanging coffin was completed, or whether there are many opinions, most of the arguments about the method of placing the hanging coffin are often from deliberate imagination, and there is no conclusive evidence.
As for why there was such a cliff burial custom as hanging coffins in ancient times, from the records left by the servants and the ancient Qiang people, it is mainly because of their ancestors' worship of natural things.
The servants felt that after the death of a person, he could not be contaminated with earth qi, otherwise his soul would not be able to ascend into the celestial realm, and the way of hanging the coffin was also to allow the soul to ascend into the immortal world, while the Qiang people felt that the way of hanging the coffin and burying the coffin could make the body hang in the air and the soul soar, so that it could obtain incomparable divine power and have a protective effect on the descendants.
In general, the reason for the hanging coffin custom in the past was mainly due to the culture of the time, which is the same as what we call the burial customs of the earth, as well as the heavenly burial customs in Tibet and Mongolia.
According to archaeology, the custom of hanging coffins has appeared in ancient times, and has been popular since the Spring and Autumn Period, and until the middle and late Ming Dynasty, hanging coffins gradually disappeared, and the last to use hanging coffins were the servants of the southwest.
The use of hanging coffins is not the Han people of the Central Plains, mainly the Baiyue on the southeast coast and the barbarians in the southwest, and these ethnic groups in the pre-Qin period, more or less belong to the same Yue cultural influence area, they have similar customs are also very normal, during the Ming Dynasty, the servants began to abandon their own cultural traditions in order to avoid the encirclement and suppression of the imperial court.
Due to the cultural integration between the various ethnic groups, the custom of hanging coffins has slowly disappeared, and the servants have become the last ethnic group to use hanging coffins, and there is basically no cliff burial method such as hanging coffins in East Asia after the Ming Dynasty.