Yao Yuzhong, born in 1962, a native of Ningcheng County, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has been in the tomb robbery circle for more than 30 years, only has a primary school education, and he is known as "Zushiye" and "the first master of tomb robbery" in the tomb robbery circle, and is also the biggest grave robbery case ruled by the court since the founding of New China.
On October 17, 2017, the Liaoning Higher People's Court rendered a final judgment on the case, finding the main culprit, Yao Yuzhong, guilty of robbery, the crime of excavating ancient cultural sites and ancient tombs, and the crime of reselling cultural relics, and punishing several crimes at the same time, and decided to execute the death penalty with a two-year suspension of execution.
At 3:00 a.m. on November 25, 1962, Yao Yuzhong was born in Xinfang Village, Ningcheng County, Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia, and the Yao family brothers' generation coincided with the "jade" generation, so his father named him Yao Yuzhong. The Yao family is an authentic "cropper", who does not understand feng shui and tombs, and the "ancestral" is "weaving mats and selling shoes". Yao Yuzhong's hometown is the area where the Hongshan culture, a representative of Chinese agricultural civilization more than 5,000 years ago, is located.
Hongshan culture is five or six thousand years ago, cultural relics experts in this area found about 5500 years ago a large altar goddess temple stone mound and pyramid-style buildings, the place is mostly stone mounds, the cemetery interior partition, many tombs in thousands of years of weathering, soil erosion, excavation, buried very shallow, generally only one or two meters deep.
Yao Yuzhong is the third oldest in the family, he only has a primary school education, and he learned to weave baskets and carry bricks from primary school. In the eyes of the villagers, he is particularly clever, and he likes to read books, and the books he reads are "feng shui, I Ching" and the like, and he reads there every day.
Especially after he got married, his image began to change greatly. In addition to farming, he no longer weaved baskets and carried bricks, began to wear a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, and his clothes were changed to artistic Zhongshan suits and long coats.
In addition to changing his image, Yao Yuzhong often went to famous museums and tomb groups for "field visits". He also came up with his own observation experience: "If there is a green dragon on the left and a white tiger on the right, with a leaning on the top and a photo on the bottom, it is a typical feng shui treasure land and a place suitable for burial." ”
After the metamorphosis, Yao Yuzhong made a self-made tool called "Zazi", as well as essential tools such as compass instruments, metal detectors, and three-dimensional stereoscopic imagers, and began his career as a tomb robber.
According to public information, Yao Yuzhong Yao Yuzhong committed crimes very frequently, going out to commit crimes more than 200 times in just over a year from 2013 to 2014. Here are a few of the most significant grave robberies:
In June 2012, Yao Yuzhong sold a pair of jade bracelets to Tian Yajun for 60,000 yuan, and yao later mortgaged a piece of jade bi to Tian in the name of borrowing 50,000 yuan from Tian. After identification, the jade bi and a pair of jade bracelets are both first-class excavated cultural relics from the Neolithic era;
In May 2013, Yao Yuzhong sold three horseshoe-shaped jade hoops and a pair of jade bracelets to Zhang Peng for 1.3 million yuan. After appraisal, the 2 horseshoe-shaped jade hoops and a pair of jade bracelets involved in the case were first-class excavated cultural relics; 1 horseshoe-shaped jade hoop was a modern item;
In February 2014, Yao Yuzhong mortgaged 8 pieces of jade from the Hongshan period to Zhang Peng's younger brother Zhang Rui in the name of borrowing 300,000 yuan, and agreed that if the loan was overdue, 8 pieces of jade would belong to Zhang Rui.
In July 2014, Zhang Peng sold seven of the jades to Li Chunbao, and Li sold three of the horseshoe tubes to Yang Haichen through others for 190,000 yuan, after which Li remitted the money to Zhang Rui. After appraisal, among the cultural relics involved in the case, 6 are first-class excavated cultural relics and 1 is a second-class excavated cultural relic;
One day in August 2014, Yao Yuzhong approached Wang Jingshan to discuss that Wang Jingshan would find someone to rob Feng Jie's cultural relics, and Yao Yuzhong would be responsible for selling the stolen goods. Wang Jingshan then gathered Li Peng, An Shenming, and Li Xueguo (all handled separately) to premeditate the crime of robbery;
In early October of the same year, Yao Yuzhong and the above-mentioned personnel planned the details of the robbery, and in the middle of the same month, led the above-mentioned personnel to the residences and other places where Feng Jie often entered to inspect and step on points, and provided the cost of committing the crime and Feng Jie's personal information to Wang Jingshan;
In November 2014, Yao Yuzhong also sold Li Baochun a pair of jade bracelets for 240,000 yuan. After identification, the jade bracelet involved in the case is a first-class cultural relics excavated from the Neolithic era of Hongshan culture;
In November 2014, Yao Yuzhong sent someone to kidnap Feng and take him to an abandoned mine, saying that if he did not hand over the Hongshan cultural jade in his hand, he would be buried on the spot, and Feng had to hand over the safe key of his antique shop. The kidnappers went straight to Feng's antique shop and seized 11 pieces of Hongshan jade and other cultural relics.
In the second half of 2014, the case-handling personnel found Yao Yuzhong's figure during the investigation: he wore gold-rimmed glasses, dressed neatly and elegantly, especially liked to climb the mountain, and when there was nothing to do, he would go around the nearby mountain, sometimes a turn was a day, and no one could tell what he was doing on the mountain. This strange move aroused the suspicion of the investigators.
After the police arrested Yao Yuzhong, on the way to escort him to identify the scene, this "first master outside the Guanwai" took advantage of the lack of guards and rushed to a large rock on the mountain, attempting to commit suicide, and was stopped in time.
When Yao Yuzhong was arrested, the police searched for a number of cultural relics in his mansion, and then when they searched Yao Yuzhong's son's home, they found that the partition full of daily necessities was somewhat unusual, so they opened the partition and found that there was a safe hidden in it, and the safe contained valuable bronzes and wrenches and other cultural relics.
The police rushed to Yao Yuzhong's hometown more than 100 kilometers away to search, and found 4 strings of red agate beads in a well more than 10 meters deep in the courtyard, which was later identified by experts as a Cultural Relics of the Liao Dynasty.
In May 2015, the Ministry of Public Security announced that the largest tomb robbery case since the founding of the People's Republic of China had been solved, arresting a total of 225 criminal suspects, destroying 12 criminal gangs of robbery and excavation, and recovering 2,063 cultural relics involved in the case. Yao Yuzhong is the "big brother" among the criminal suspects who were arrested.
On October 17, 2017, the Liaoning Higher People's Court rendered a final judgment on the case: it upheld the first-instance judgment and found the main offender, Yao Yuzhong, guilty of robbery, the crime of excavating ancient cultural sites and ancient tombs, and the crime of reselling cultural relics, and punished several crimes at the same time, and decided to execute the death penalty with a two-year suspension of execution.