There is a small hill raised in the south of Weishan Lake, which looks like a giant wheel floating on the lake, called Weishan in Shang Dynasty and Weishan Island in Ming Dynasty.
The episode of the movie "Railway Guerrillas", "Play My Beloved Earthen Pipa", let the nation know about Weishan Lake Weishan Island.
The small island has a total area of 9 square kilometers, with a high point of 91.6 meters above sea level and 14 existing villages.
This is a tourist area, and every summer and autumn, people living in the city's high-rise buildings like to come here to enjoy the infinite scenery of the vast expanse and the connection between the sky and the sky.
The tour guide speaks about the lake and the lotus and the railway guerrillas, without mentioning the ancient tombs of the Han Dynasty and the excavated artifacts.
This is because, after the archaeologists cleaned the tomb, they filled in the pit and leveled the ground as soon as possible to prevent inducing unscrupulous people to rob the tomb.
Therefore, the tour guides and tourists do not know the condition of Han tombs on Weishan Island and ignore the important content and historical weight of Han culture on Weishan Island.
Qin Shi Huang unified the six kingdoms, the world was divided into 36 counties, and counties were set up under the counties, and Liu County was set up by the Si River in Sihui County, and Liu City was built.
Where are the officials and citizens who remain in the city buried after death?
The county is surrounded by flooded land, people look at the northeast ten miles of the Weishan, have come here to compete for feng shui, grab the cemetery.
This is the high point of Liuxian County, the hill is not high, the choice of tomb selection feng shui is quite good.
At that time, there was no Weishan Lake, and it was convenient to carry the coffin for burial.
Many ancient tombs were destroyed by Ming Dynasty immigrants who built villages on the island to take soil.
During the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China to the early years of the founding of New China, villagers dug up a large number of grave stones for building bridges, ditches and pig pens, and excavated pottery as chicken food pots.
In the 1980s I took over the work of cultural relics, to the island to take a look at the mountain and the mountain burial crowded, scattered, the foothills and many tomb stones submerged under the lake.
I have experienced over 20 years of tomb excavations and the Han tombs on the island fall into four categories.
One is a mound tomb of a poor family, i.e., a body wrapped in a straw mat and buried in a mound, accompanied by a clay pot and a few coins.
The second is slightly rich family stone coffin tomb, that is, the stone coffin plate built into a rectangular box, and then the thin wooden coffin into the stone coffin, covered with a cover stone, and then placed outside the stone coffin pottery as burial goods;.
Thirdly, wealthy families purchased stone coffins with engravings, i.e. painted stone tombs, accompanied by pottery, bronze, jade and silverware.
The fourth is a multi-chamber tomb, which was built in the middle of the Eastern Han Dynasty, i.e., the front door, the front room, the second door, and the main room of the couple with stone masonry, and the portraits were carved on the stone surface. People who used this type of tomb must be higher status, financial resources, follow the rituals of the rich, burial goods exquisite, high volume, high price.
Excavation of ancient tombs is not a treasure hunt, at will, according to the "Cultural Relics Law" must be approved by the provincial and municipal cultural relics bureau for the record, in accordance with the law.
We excavated more than three hundred ancient tombs, harvesting a large number of cultural relics full of joy at the same time, there are also deep regret, the vast majority of stone coffin tombs have triangular-shaped robber holes in the cover stone.
This was the result of military tomb raiding in the late Eastern Han Dynasty.
According to the Three Kingdoms Records, Dong Zhuo and Cao Cao had been fighting for years and were short of food and clothing, so they encouraged their soldiers to raid the tombs.
Where Liu's royal tombs are not spared once they are found, gold, bronze and coins are dug out for military expenses.
Therefore, many king's tombs and small tombs of officials and citizens were dug up by the army in broad daylight, resulting in "nine empty tombs" among the people.
The tomb-robbing sergeants also worked very hard, they entered the dark tomb from the narrow robber hole, and inevitably had sloppy work, thanks to their sloppiness to today's archaeological work left a little artifact harvest.
The sergeant got out what was of practical value from the tomb and exchanged it for food and clothes for money among the people.
And the burial pottery is worthless, so the burial pottery in the tomb is unharmed.
Such is the case with the Han tomb on Weishan Island.
[Carriage and horses running to the nether world]
Six or seven thousand years ago, human burials in primitive society were accompanied by cooking utensils, and this funeral custom has continued with the development of mankind until today.
Han Dynasty not only buried with cooking utensils, and wine utensils, rich households in the pottery pot filled with wine, in the pottery warehouse, pottery kettle, pottery basin filled with grain and rice, in the pottery tripod, pottery box filled with fish filled with meat placed in the tomb, so that the deceased in the nine springs under the hunger, thirst not.
We excavated the few intact stone coffin tombs that had not been robbed, two meters below the surface.
Uncovered stone, skeleton intact, iron hairpin under the skeleton, jade cicada in the mouth, iron sword placed in the chest, a pile of copper coins at the waist, the foot covered with a black cloth, a pile of ceramic cooking utensils outside the stone coffin, with ceramic jars, pots, stoves, bowls, bins, wells, mills and pig pens.
There is a large tomb on the hillside in the north of Wanzhuang village, with five stone coffins in a 7×6-meter, 6-meter-deep earthwork, one of which is slightly taller and is male, with wives and concubines on the left and right.
Although this tomb was disturbed by theft, there are still more than 200 pieces of silver, iron, lead, jade, bamboo and bone artifacts remaining.
Among them, jade cicadas, stone inkstones, glazed earthenware pots and 16 portrait stones are precious cultural relics, and the earthenware cooking utensils are beautifully made.
Details have been published in the monthly magazine "Archaeology" in Beijing and introduced to the world and abroad.
Four of these five stone coffin tombs have images carved on the inner walls of the stone coffins, and the images are expressed in the form of shaded line carvings, which are exquisitely carved and rich in content.
It means that the deceased was taken to the netherworld in a light carriage, accompanied by several covered wagons and escorts.
After crossing the Nahe Bridge, the ancestors of the Yin Division welcomed them back, and then went to visit the Western Queen Mother in the Western Paradise to ask for immortality medicine, and the Jade Rabbit was pounding the medicine with a pestle beside the Western Queen Mother.
When I returned from the medicine, the ancestors had already set up the reception wine upstairs, and the female ancestors cooked meat on the stove.
After a full meal, we watched the music and dance, and then stayed at the Jade House.
In the underworld, there are many ancestors accompanying them, and there are official titles and uniforms, and they are in an environment of song and dance and carefree, living a life of abundance and food that they cannot enjoy on earth.
[Han Dynasty funeral map
The nine springs are not cold, the underworld is not lonely, death is not terrible, and the living do not have to worry about sorrow.
This is the theme of Han painting. The painters in the stone carving workshop imagined and conjectured many details of Yinji around this theme, giving full play to their artistic skills and leaps of thought, and painted with great delicacy.
The aim is that the richer the picture is, the more the mourners will like it, and the more the stone carving products will sell.
At that time, the portrait stones were only funerary objects, but two thousand years later they have become a precious cultural heritage and a fine work of culture and art.
Lu, Su, Henan, and Shaanxi are multi-production areas of portrait stones, it is a discipline, and various universities and colleges set up departments for the study of Han painting.
Although Weishan Island is a tiny place, the unearthed portrait stones are famous at home and abroad.
In 1975, a portrait stone from the Xinmang period was unearthed in Gounan Village, which became famous at home and abroad.
The content is funeral and burial, and the picture is engraved with a hearse carrying a corpse, mourning children and mourning women wearing mourning to the funeral, 8 clansmen pulling the carriage with a rope, sage grandson holding a streamer to lead the way, and a person at the forefront kneeling to welcome them by pressing a staff.
The gravesite on the hill has been dug and the stone coffin has been built, and the family and mourning family members are waiting at the gravesite.
Although there are historical records of ancient funeral rituals, the Qin and Han funeral rituals are expressed in the form of images, which are more intuitive, more graphic, and more readily understandable.
Many academic journals and folklore publications in China and abroad have chosen this chart. A paper in Vietnam is devoted to the study of this portrait, and Ms. Bei Junyi from the United States came to study this picture and wrote an article on ancient Chinese mourning rituals upon her return to China.
The funeral portrait stone is the most precious cultural heritage unearthed in Weishan Island, and is the most valuable archaeological data for the study of Qin and Han folk customs, filial and old rites, and following funeral rites.
The Han tombs on Weishan Island are mostly from the Western Han and Xinmang periods, and gradually decrease in the middle of the Eastern Han Dynasty. No tombs from the Jin, North and South Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties, or Song and Jin were found.
It shows that in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, the Yellow River flooded and the yellow water came south along the Si River to erode Liuxian County, so people gradually moved and Liuxian City became a ruin.
In the Ming Dynasty, the yellow water was even more ferocious, flooding Liucheng and the Si River.
After the formation of Weishan Lake, the ancient tombs at the foot of the mountain were inexorably submerged in water, and only Weishan stood on the lake with an unyielding head.
