In 228, when Zhuge Liang's first Northern Expedition was frustrated at Jieting, Eastern Wu's offensive against Cao Wei made a major breakthrough, and the Wu army defeated Cao Xiu at Shiting and captured more than 10,000 Wei troops.
The first meritorious servant of the Battle of Shiting, The Taishou Zhou Of Poyang, made a name for himself in this way, and along with Zhou Qu, he was also famous for his son Zhou Fu.
However, unlike his father, who made a name for himself by his military exploits, Zhou was "notorious", and this second-generation official's brother indulged in wanton desires when he was young, and was listed as one of the "three harms" by the people of Eastern Wu.
When Zhou Grew up, he felt his notoriety among his neighbors, changed his former wrongs, eliminated the harm of Jiao, made meritorious achievements, and became a model for the prodigal son of ancient China to return.
Zhou's second "fame" was more than 1600 years later.
In 1953, the Nanjing Museum excavated the Zhou Tomb in Yixing, and found a number of perforated metal bands in the excavated cultural relics, and many metal fragments were scattered around, and after testing and analysis by the Department of Chemistry of Nanjing University, an explosive conclusion was drawn: the fragment composition was: aluminum 85%, copper 10%, manganese 5%, aluminum alloy products.
As soon as the test results came out, it immediately triggered a controversy among experts in the history of metallurgy around the world.
As we all know, aluminum is one of the three most widely distributed elements on the earth, but metal aluminum is difficult to smelt. In 1825, the Danish chemist Oster first reduced a few milligrams of metallic aluminum from anhydrous aluminum chloride; in 1855, at the Paris Industrial Exposition, aluminum first appeared as a commodity, and the price was equivalent to gold; in 1886, scientists in the United States and France pushed the production of aluminum to industrialization through electrolysis.
Metal aluminum was born in the 19th century, is the product of modern science and technology, which has become a global consensus, but in 297 AD (the seventh year of the Western Jin Dynasty) in the Zhou Tomb found modern science and technology products, the emergence of this cross-cultural relics, undoubtedly caused a sensation in the world.
For the sake of prudence, in 1958, the Department of Engineering Chemistry of Tsinghua University once again conducted a spectral qualitative analysis of the metal fragments of the Zhou Tomb, and concluded that aluminum (a large amount), copper, iron, lead, manganese, magnesium, silver (the above small amount), no doubt, this is indeed an aluminum product.
In 1960, the French "Magazine of Machinery and Automatic Devices" published an article entitled "Two thousand years ago China had mastered aluminum alloy in the Jin Dynasty"; in 1963, the Soviet Union's "Bulletin of Higher Education" also published an article entitled "On the Ancient Manufacture of Aluminum Alloys", archaeologists and metallurgical experts around the world are speculating: How did Chinese more than 1600 years ago extract aluminum?
Some foreign scientists believe that in ancient China, it was possible to use hydraulic blowers to obtain high temperatures, and it is possible that aluminum minerals were directly reduced by fire.
But the first to question is some Chinese experts, who believe that "from the perspective of the history of technological development, it is impossible for the Western Jin Dynasty to refine aluminum, so aluminum sheets must be mixed in later generations." Xia Nai, a well-known archaeologist, proposed that when the archaeological team entered the tomb around the place, the tomb had been excavated many times, so there were obvious traces of disturbance in the tomb, especially the fragments were selected from the silt as much as possible, and there was no guarantee that the small pieces of aluminum must not be mixed in by later generations.
Professor Xia's doubt is not impossible, the pre-Dynastic tombs in Egypt have found glass beads left by tomb robberies, and the "Swiss watch" found in the ancient tombs of the Ming Dynasty in Guangxi is also such a situation.
However, Professor Luo Zongzhen of Nanjing University, who personally experienced the archaeological excavations of the Zhou Tomb, insisted that the damage caused by the two excavations of the Zhou Tomb was above the silt layer, and the fragments were excavated under the silt, and there were thick sediments on the surface of the excavation, with the same color, composition and thickness, indicating that the fragments were buried for a long time and were not modern mixtures.
Since then, whether the aluminum fragments are the original funerary objects of the surrounding tombs, and whether the ancient Chinese before 1700 years ago had the technology to refine metal aluminum, has become the focus of controversy.
In 1983, the International New Minerals Commission confirmed the existence of natural aluminum, and natural aluminum spots were also found in lunar soil, and subsequently, natural aluminum with a purity of more than 83% was also found in Guangxi, China.
Nearly half a century after the excavation of the tomb of the Three Kingdoms Warlord Zhou, some scholars have put forward a new point of view: Since natural aluminum exists, will the aluminum fragments of the Zhou tomb also be natural aluminum inadvertently obtained by the ancients on the mainland?
Not only that, in the 1970s, the United States and Japan carried out experiments on pyrotechnic aluminum smelting and successfully extracted pure aluminum. At the same time, this indirectly confirms the possibility that the ancients in the Three Kingdoms and Western Jin Dynasties used fire to refine aluminum.
However, to this day, there is still no conclusive jury as to whether the metal fragments of the Zhou tombs were mixed in later generations, or whether the alchemists of the Eastern Wu and Western Jin Dynasties had inadvertently obtained them, or whether the ancients had originally mastered the method of aluminum smelting, but they were lost for various reasons.
The mainland Taiwan media are inclined to the latter, believing that the ancients on the mainland really mastered the method of aluminum smelting, and the excavated cultural relics of the tombs around the world changed the world's metallurgical history.
What do you think of this controversy?