The construction team dug up an ancient tomb of the Sui Dynasty, and the coffin under it was engraved with a vicious warning of "the one who opens is dead", and the owner of the tomb is only a 9-year-old girl.
The story takes place in 1957. In an empty wasteland in Liangjiazhuang, the western part of the city in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, a nearby unit planned to build a warehouse here, so it invited a team of workers.
But as soon as the construction of the warehouse began, the workers encountered a strange thing, a shovel down into the dirt, it would make a crisp sound. Curious workers shoveled the dirt, revealing in front of them an old bluestone slab with some cracks.
The workers are all natives of Shaanxi, and they are convinced of the saying that "cultural relics are everywhere in Shaanxi", and as soon as they saw this old stone slab, they realized that they might have touched the ancient tomb, and immediately stopped the construction and notified the archaeological team.
After some rescue excavation by the archaeological team, the team members roughly determined the specifications of the tomb. It is a rectangular vertical pit tomb with a sloped grave of seven meters long, with a large outsole. This kind of tomb is also known in archaeology as a vertical pit tomb with a flat armor shape, which is a tomb of higher specifications.
Unlike the simple and somewhat rudimentary appearance of this tomb, there are many mysteries in the burial chamber. Conspicuously present throughout the burial chamber is a stone coffin. The material is not surprising, but the style of this stone rafter surprised the archaeologists.
The stone rafter as a whole is in the shape of a palace, the coffin lid is roof-shaped, the lotus pattern is clearly visible, and the door on the side wall of the coffin is even more delicate to the extent of each door nail, and the two sides are even more patterned with maids, which is exceptionally exquisite and gorgeous.
But when everyone admired the pattern of the coffin, suddenly a member of the team called out, and everyone saw that there was an inscription on the coffin, "The one who opens is dead."
These four big characters appeared under the light, the temperature in the tomb seemed to have dropped by a few degrees, if the original construction team dug here, I was afraid that I would be scared to turn around and run, but the archaeologists were well trained after all, although they were scared by this curse, they could still continue to excavate this tomb.
Just behind the stone rafters, less than three square meters away from the walls of the tomb, layers of funerary objects were piled up. There are countless pottery figurines, precious treasures, glass products, etc., and there are more than 230 pieces in total.
And all kinds of town tomb beasts, maid figurines, samurai figurines, and various daily necessities and other funerary items are really "dead as life", as if they are worried about the life of the tomb owner in another world.
Logically, such a delicate coffin, and so many funerary products, the owner of the tomb is not a relative of the emperor and the state, but should also be a noble figure. However, the specifications of this tomb are too small, and it seems to be completely incompatible with the funerary products inside.
After opening the sarcophagus, the archaeologists found that the brocade that was originally used to wrap the tomb owner had decayed, but it was still judged from the shape and size of the skeleton that the tomb owner was a little girl.
Around the little girl's neck was a splendid necklace, strung together by twenty-eight metal balls, each of which was inlaid with ten pearls, and at the end of which was a chicken blood stone surrounded by twenty-four pearls, and on the lapis lazuli at the other end of the necklace was carved a lifelike deer pattern. The necklace as a whole is biased towards the Western style, and although it has been buried for many years, it still looks gorgeous and abnormal.
In addition to the necklace, experts also noticed a gold headdress consisting of a combination of hundreds of flowers, each of which was shaped by gold and silver wire and pearls. Above the headdress, there is also a butterfly woven of gold wire, as if to take nectar.
In addition, the experts also found many carved round and cute animal toys, from which it is not difficult to see the love of the tomb owner's family. However, this also made the archaeologists more curious about the identity of the tomb owner.
After a comprehensive cleaning of the entire burial chamber and coffin, experts finally found the tombstone, which is also the most direct and effective way to understand the identity of the tomb owner.
The epitaph is only three hundred and seventy words short, although it is not long, but it is concise. It turned out that the owner of the tomb was surnamed Li, named Li Jingxun, who was only nine years old and was a Sui Dynasty person. Her great-grandfather Li Xian served as a general of the Northern Zhou Dynasty, and her grandfather Li Chong, who was also a famous general of the same generation, was later martyred. Her father, Li Min, was favored by Emperor Wen of Sui and was kept in the palace for a long time.
Li Jingxun's maternal status was even more prominent, her grandmother was named Yang Lihua, the daughter of Emperor Wen of Sui, the sister of Emperor Jue of Sui, and when she was young, she married Emperor Xuan of Zhou. Li Min, on the other hand, married Yang Lihua and Emperor Xuan of Zhou's concubine Princess Yuwen Eying, and gave birth to Li Jingxun.
Yang Lihua was very fond of Li Jingxun's granddaughter, and regarded her as the only consolation for the second half of her life, whether it was gold, silver and jade or various treasures from the Western Regions, she could be taken away and given to Li Jingxun as a toy, which could be said to be not a princess like a princess.
Unfortunately, Yang Lihua's thousands of care and pampering could not prevent Li Jingxun from dying of illness, and all she could do was to disregard the constraints of etiquette and add funeral goods far beyond what the etiquette system allowed, and then add the curse of "the opener is dead" to her coffin, trying to protect her from being disturbed by posterity.
The magnificent funerary products in this tomb not only pin the deep love of an elder for the younger generation, but also a witness to the cultural exchanges between China and the West brought about by the ancient Silk Road. These wordless objects travel through the long years, wordlessly appealing to future generations for everything that has been.