In the spring of 1972, Mawangdui in Changsha City, Hunan Province, suddenly became famous, and it turned out that an ancient tomb was found in this remote small township, which was not small. As soon as the news came out, many people rushed to watch to see what treasure was hidden in this humble hill.
After four months of excavations, archaeologists finally discovered the underground palace and found many good things in the tomb, such as exquisite lacquerware, gorgeous and exquisite silk fabrics, and so on.
Paintings unearthed from the tomb of Xin Chai
In this ancient tomb also found a female corpse, amazingly, unlike the ordinary corpse will become a skeleton with time, this female corpse of Mawangdui has not decayed for thousands of years, and was found wrapped in luxurious silk products, although the skin is dry and wrinkled, it is still elastic, it can be speculated that it is a noble lady with a good face.
The discovery of the "Sleeping Beauty of the East" in Changsha has made the archaeological community at home and abroad boil. After all, except for the mummy, such a well-preserved corpse has never been found, and for a time, well-known experts and scholars rushed to Changsha to explore the mystery of the female corpse.
In the winter of the same year, in order to preserve the female corpse for the follow-up, Premier Zhou issued an instruction to dissect the female corpse and remove the internal organs for easy preservation.
Ma Wang piles up female corpses
In this autopsy, Peng Longxiang, the main knife, found that there were 138 undigested melon seeds in his stomach and intestines, and combined with the pathological report, he successfully deduced the cause of death of this thousand-year-old female corpse.
What is the identity of this female corpse? Why is it so well preserved? And what did you die for?
01 Surprised by the ancient tomb and found the female corpse
This female corpse was Xin Chai, the wife of The State of Changsha during the Western Han Dynasty, who died in 168 BC and was discovered by the world in the spring of more than 2,000 years later.
In 1951, Xia Nai, a famous archaeologist on the mainland, was invited by the government to Changsha to preside over the excavation of more than 1,000 ancient tombs. When he passed through the suburban Mawangdui Township, he saw two small mounds, which are said to be the burial places of Ma Yin, the king of Chu in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, and his son, which is called Mawangdui.
With years of archaeological experience, Xia Nai immediately denied this legend, he turned around on the mound, picked up a piece of soil and said, "The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms are the ninth century AD, but this soil obviously has to be pushed forward for hundreds of years, and it is certainly not the tomb of Ma Yin and his son." ”
But he did not organize the excavation of mawangdui, but only instructed the local government to protect it well, and these two small mounds are not simple. In the first few years, the government did heed Xia Nai's admonition and set up a sign to protect Mawangdui, but the area was really desolate, and with the passage of time, the sign was lost.
Xia Nai
At the end of 1971, the whole country was mobilizing to build air raid shelters, and the 366 Hospital of the Provincial Military District stationed in Changsha City, Hunan Province, selected Mawangdui as the site for building air defense wards and warehouses.
Who understood, only dug for less than a month, dug out of the air raid shelter always appeared a small range of collapse, the construction team felt very strange, but the project is urgent, can only continue the construction first. A week later, a worker inserted the steel braze as usual, but unusually, a stream of water immediately spewed out of the hole in the plug, unusually wet and cold, and a foul smell of gas gushed out.
The worker sensed something was wrong and immediately asked the foreman to come over and see what was going on. Fortunately, the foreman was well-informed, saw this unusual gas, and immediately took out a match and put it into the gas, and sure enough, the match instantly spontaneously combusted, and a blue flame appeared.
This frightened the workers, and the construction site made people panic, saying that it was haunted and that work should not be started next to the tomb, which made the owner of the tomb angry. The contractor didn't think it was haunted, but the gas was really not simple, and he thought that others said it was an ancient tomb, so he called the Hunan Provincial Museum.
Hou Liang, then deputy director of the museum, answered the phone and suddenly remembered Xia Nai's words, which may be a closed and intact ancient tomb. So he asked the foreman to protect the area first, and then summoned the staff of the museum to rush to the Mawangdui construction site, and after the survey, he made a report to the province, asking for the construction to be stopped immediately and the archaeological protective excavation work to be carried out.
In January 1972, the archaeological work of Mawangdui was officially carried out, but changsha was also in the rainy season at this time, and the continuous rainy days caused great difficulties in excavation. It took nearly 4 months and nearly 20 meters to dig, and finally dug into the burial chamber, opening the underground palace that had been sealed for 2,000 years.
Mawangdui No. 1 Tomb - Tomb of Mrs. Xin Chai
As soon as you enter the burial chamber, you can see a huge wooden rafter at the bottom, and archaeologists have found a seal around the coffin with the inscription "Concubine Xin Chai", from which we know that the owner of the tomb is a woman named Xin Chai.
Around the coffin are four boxes with different contents, which basically restore the rich and comfortable life of Mrs. Xin Chai's death.
The box on the east side contains a large amount of food, which should be his favorite delicacy before his death. In the box there is also a fine lacquerware Ding, experts open a look, it turned out to be lotus slice soup, lotus slices still look very fresh, but only a few seconds, strange things came, lotus slices suddenly disappeared in front of everyone's eyes, it turned out that this is the lotus slice after thousands of years of self-melting phenomenon.
Lotus slice soup
The chest on the west side is Mrs. Xin Chai's clothes, shoes and socks, etc., covering all four seasons, and each piece of clothing has a high textile process, the most famous of which is the thin cicada-winged plain gauze Zen robe of only 48 grams.
The chest on the south side contains puppets symbolizing slaves, and there are many scenes of servants working.
In the north box is the scene of the banquet, and many of the musicians played by puppetes are singing and dancing, and it can be seen that Mrs. Xin Chai must be a woman who loves song and dance.
Plain gauze Zen clothes
On April 28, 1972, after the discovery of the coffin in the burial chamber, Hou Liang immediately brought a crane to hoist it out and transported it to the museum. That evening, experts from the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who were urgently transferred from Beijing, led the experts to open the inner coffin.
02 The mystery of the incorruptible female corpse and the truth of the cause of death
The inner coffin containing the corpse is more than 2 meters long and about 50 centimeters wide, and when the expert opened the lid of the coffin, he saw the corpse soaked in red coffin liquid, and the body was tightly wrapped in bright and luxurious silk fabrics.
After two days of processing, about 20 layers of silk were peeled to see the true appearance of Xin Chai, which stunned the experts.
When the coffin was opened, it was thought to be a skeleton that was no different from many ancient corpses, but I did not expect that this female corpse was so well preserved, lying peacefully in the coffin, as if it had just died.
Her skin was pale yellow, slightly wrinkled, elastic at press, and she had hair and wig bags on her head, which could be seen to have been carefully groomed after death. The eardrum of the left ear is intact, the fingerprints of the hand are clear, but the two eyeballs have bulges and the tongue is protruding, which belongs to the early decay phenomenon.
This discovery shocked everyone, before the discovery of the female corpse, only the layers of mummies could be so intact, how did China do it more than two thousand years ago?
If you want something not to decay, you must isolate the air, which means that the burial chamber has been sealed for more than two thousand years. After an investigation of the perimeter of the burial chamber, nearly a meter of white plaster mud and thousands of tons of charcoal were found, which were materials that could absorb water and isolate air.
But these were not enough to resist the evolution of more than two thousand years, so experts took a deeper look, especially the coffin and the coffin.
It turns out that this coffin is not ordinary wood, and its material and structure are very important. Mrs. Xin Chai's wooden rafters are made of cypress wood, hard and corrosion-resistant, and the entire wooden rafters are not built without a single nail, but developed by craftsmen, cutting the wood into suitable sizes and assembling them in one go, without a single gap.
Mrs. Sincha coffin
After the test of the effusion extracted from the rafter, acetic acid, mercury and other components were also tested, which can play a role in sterilization and antiseptic. That is to say, Mrs. Xin Chai can only survive two thousand years of immortality under the protection of the layers inside and outside the coffin.
But as archaeology progresses, a difficult problem is in front of everyone. How should Mrs. Xin Chai be preserved after she has been exposed to the air? You know, changsha's summer can be described as a furnace, normal people can't stand it, let alone the fragile pursuit?
The Hunan Provincial Museum asked its superiors for instructions on the next step, and at the same time formulated a protection plan for the preservation of Mrs. Xin Chai. After many discussions, it was decided to inject formalin into the corpse, and then several major medical experts in the country configured a special protective liquid into the simple coffin, which only contains formalin, alcohol, distilled water, and strives to maximize the effect of sterilization and antiseptic.
In order to keep the coffin at low temperatures, the museum also placed a large number of ice cubes around the coffin, and in this way, Mrs. Xin Chai was well preserved for several months. But this method has never been a long-term solution, and the above instructions have been delayed, but the experts are anxious.
At this time, because the news of "no decaying thousand-year-old female corpse" was too shocking, the whole country wanted to see fangrong, and the media rushed to report it. A Xinhua reporter learned of the dilemma of preserving the body and reported it to the State Council in the form of internal reference.
When Premier Zhou learned about it, he was very attentive. Immediately issued instructions to stop opening to the outside world and focus on the protection of cultural relics. Subsequently, Guo Moruo, who was then in the courtyard of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed that the female corpse could be preserved by removing internal organs. After hearing this, Premier Zhou resolutely gave instructions for the dissection of the female corpse and put forward a requirement for her preservation for 200 years.
On the night of receiving Premier Zhou's instructions, Mrs. Xin Chai was quietly transferred to Hunan Medical College for preservation. On December 14, 1972, Professor Cao Meihong of Hunan Medical College and Peng Longxiang, assistant professor of the Pathological Anatomy Research Department of Hunan Medical College, prepared the autopsy, which was mainly knifed by Peng Longxiang.
Examine the female corpse
The first knife of the dissection was opened in the chest, and after opening the chest cavity, the personnel present were pleasantly surprised to find that the internal organs of the corpse were actually intact in place, and in the follow-up further medical examination, it was found that Mrs. Xin Chai's body was not very good before she died, and there were nearly nine diseases such as gallstones and lumbar intervertebral disc herniation.
But these are not the causes of death, and Mrs. Xin Chai's death is a disaster caused by "eating melons". Through autopsy, a total of 138 melon seeds were found in Mrs. Xinchai's stomach, intestines and esophagus. Under this prompt, experts analyzed that she caused biliary colic after eating too much melon, and eventually caused myocardial infarction and died.
Under the leadership of modern science and technology, we have spanned more than 2,000 years of time and uncovered the mystery of Mrs. Xin Chai's death. This also can't help but sigh, although the melon fruit is sweet, but don't be greedy.
03 The identity of the female corpse is revealed
Although there are many valuable antiquities in the Xin Chai tomb, experts are still a little discouraged, because it has been more than a year since the discovery of Mrs. Xin Chai, but after the investigation of Mrs. Xin Chai and her tomb, Xin Chai's identity has still not been explored. This also adds many obstacles for archaeologists to study Mawangdui.
In order to solve this problem, and in order to explore more stories of Mawangdui, in the winter of 1973, many archaeologists in China rushed to Changsha to prepare for the excavation of two other tombs in Mawangdui.
Mawangdui tombs are distributed
In January 1974, the excavation of the two tombs was largely completed, and experts were getting closer and closer to the mystery of Xin Chai's identity. Tomb No. 2 of Mawangdui has long been looted by tomb robbers, leaving only more than 200 cultural relics, but fortunately, three seals that are crucial to the identity of the owner of the tomb were found in it, and these three seals are called the "eyes" of Mawangdui.
One of the jade seals is engraved with the word "Li Cang", which is the private seal of the tomb owner, and the other two copper seals are engraved with "Seal of Waiting" and "Changsha Xiangxiang". With the help of these three seals, archaeologists determined that the owner of Tomb No. 2 was None other than Hou Licang.
Three seals
When Li Cang was young, he followed Liu Bang to participate in the peasant uprising and the Chu-Han struggle, and could be said to be the founding hero of the Han Dynasty. After the establishment of the Han Dynasty, he was given the title of Minister of the State of Changsha, one of the few old subordinates of Liu Bang who was not killed by suspicion. During the reign of Emperor Hui, he also made great contributions, and was given the title of Marquis of Yuan, and his life can be described as "loyal and heroic, and his military achievements are outstanding".
A year ago, a seal with the words "Concubine Xinchai" was also found in Xin Chai's tomb, and her name could only be known through this seal at that time. With the confirmation of Li Cang's identity, Xin Chai's identity also surfaced, because "concubine" is the ancient woman's humble name for herself in front of her husband, so the owner of Tomb No. 1, Xin Chai, is Li Cang's wife.
Xin Chai Seal
After confirming the identity of the female corpse, the archaeological team finally breathed a sigh of relief. Although there are few records of Mrs. Xin Chai in history, her magnificent burial chamber and well-preserved remains have attracted a number of experts and scholars at home and abroad to come to investigate, and people are full of curiosity about this beauty.
In January 2002, Zhao Chengwen, a professor in the Forensic Medicine Department of the China Criminal Police College, successfully restored the appearance of a Princess of the Ming Dynasty more than 500 years ago, which caused widespread discussion.
After hearing this news, the Hunan Provincial Museum warmly invited Professor Zhao to come to Changsha to repair Mrs. Xin Chai. In March, Zhao Chengwen was invited to Changsha to restore the appearance of Mrs. Xin Chai, who had died more than 2,000 years ago, in a small room.
Zhao Chengwen
Since there is no record or portrait of Xin Chai's life as a reference, Zhao Chengwen can only reason through Xin Chai's skull X-ray, facial photos at the time of excavation, and ancient books of paintings buried with him.
Under Professor Zhao's research for several months, everyone finally saw the original appearance of this Western Han Dynasty noblewoman through thousands of years, just as everyone thought, she was a great beauty.
Mrs. Xin Chai repairs the wax figure
Mrs. Xin Chai is now protected for exhibition in the Hunan Provincial Museum, along with wax figures based on her 30-year-old portrait. Every year, countless tourists come from all over the country to catch a glimpse of this "Sleeping Beauty of the East".