Shadow of the Tomb Raider: A Complete Record of the History of Tomb Raiders in China

Chapter 13 Who Are the Tomb Robbers: The Past and Present of the Tomb Robbers (3)
The Maoshan sect belongs to the Taoist sect.It was created by Tao Hongjing, a Taoist priest of Qi and Liang in the Southern Dynasties of China.Because he built a temple in Maoshan and practiced Taoism, he respected Sanmao Zhenjun as the patriarch, so it was named.It is said that Han Maoying and his younger brothers Gu and Zhong learned the Tao from Maoshan and founded the Maoshan Taoist school.This school mainly studies the scriptures of the Shangqing and other scriptures, and regards Yuanshi Tianwang, Taishang Daojun, Taiwei Tiandijun, Housheng Jinque Emperor, Taishang Laojun, etc. as the highest gods. Bigu, Daoyin and Zhaijiao.In addition to Tao Hongjing, the representatives of this school included Wang Yuanzhi, Pan Shizheng, Sima Chengzhen, Li Hanguang, etc. in the Sui and Tang Dynasties.In the Northern Song Dynasty, together with Longhu Mountain and Gezao Mountain, they were the three major talisman sects of Taoism, known as the Three Mountains of Fulu.After the Yuan Dynasty, it was merged into Zhengdao.

The Maoshan school is good at finding acupoints and tombs, feng shui sacrifices, wedding ceremonies, organ arrays, face-to-face testing, reading horoscopes, counting good and bad luck, and even changing fate against the sky, etc.Among them, the mechanism formation method and the mountain-moving and armor-moving technique were accidentally lost, forming a school of mountain-moving Taoists in the digging party.

Most of the Maoshan faction traveled around as Taoist priests, and made a living by attending weddings and weddings, watching Fengshui to find graves, and reading fortunes.The Maoshan school believes that although the destiny cannot be violated, it is changeable, so it is best at using the tomb to change the fate of others.Therefore, it is incompatible with the diggers. It is said that half of the tomb guards in the tombs of Zhongtu were created by Maoshan disciples.

The Maoshan and Laoshan factions are feuds, and the reason for the feud is difficult to trace because of the long history.In fact, most of the later generations have conflicts in the process of earning a living.Laoshan Taoists are used to destroying tombs for profit, while Maoshan disciples have to work hard to study how to prevent people from digging up hills and ruining their luck. Countless people in the two sects died at the hands of each other. Deep, even the rivers and seas can't be washed away.

In modern times, especially during the Cultural Revolution, both factions were suppressed vigorously, and they had no experience of fleeing abroad, so they were almost lost. After the reform and opening up, with the relaxation of policies, they gradually flourished again, but the momentum was not as good as before.However, within the sphere of influence of Chinese-speaking cultures such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea, the two factions are still quite influential.

These full-time tomb robbers are usually two-person partnerships before liberation. There are a few people who form gangs, and it is rare for one person to do it alone. One person digs the hole, the other clears the soil and watches the wind at the same time; later one digs into the tomb, and the other collects the pit soil and funeral objects on it.Most of these two people are related by blood (there are also many good friends), but the strange thing is that the relationship between father and son is relatively small. This may be because the business of robbery is shameful after all. Maintaining the image of being a father, I am ashamed to drag my son to do it together. The son found out later and pretended not to know.Why do two partners find blood relatives?This is to prevent people who pick up work at the entrance of the cave from killing themselves for money.That is to say, when the people under the cave finished their work and passed all their belongings up, he would slap his hands or pull the rope to signal the people at the entrance of the cave to pull him up.If the person at the entrance of the cave sees money and wants to loosen the rope when the person coming up is about to come up, the person below the cave will suddenly fall from a distance of more than four or five meters, fractured, injured and unable to move, and the person at the entrance will quickly lift the rope If the pit soil is filled down the hole, the people below will undoubtedly die.

These people have been tomb robbers for a long time, have accumulated rich experience, are good at disguising, and have a set of methods to deal with the anti-theft agencies in the tomb.After they determined the target of the robbery, they naturally rushed to take away the treasures overnight when dealing with small-scale tombs, and disappeared before dawn, making quick and clean decisions.To deal with large-scale tombs, a protracted war must be adopted. At this time, the following methods are adopted: First, open up wasteland and farm around the tombs, sowing corn, sorghum and other high-stalk crops.After they grow taller, use the green gauze tent as a cover to dig out the tomb. (To be safe, you have to wait for the crops to grow taller, which requires patience.) The second is to build a house next to the tomb to hide the eyes and ears, and then dig a tunnel from the house to lead to the tomb. There is no problem from the outside, and the tomb has been looted.The third is to build a fake tomb next to the ancient tomb, and secretly dig a tunnel to enter the tomb during construction.

No matter what method of camouflage you use, you have to dig a robbery hole in the end.After the tomb robbers determine the approximate location of the tomb, they usually dig a vertical hole directly on the ground to enter the tomb chamber, and most of the robbing holes left are circular.However, some large tombs are relatively deep, and it is easy to collapse if the passage is directly excavated. If it is not done well, the tomb robbers will be crushed to death or locked in the tomb. Therefore, there is a method of digging a square hole on the top of the tomb in advance, which can only be operated by one person. practice, so as to avoid landslides.With the maturity of tomb-robbing technology, a roundabout method of digging holes appeared, and the hole was changed from a circle to a square, and wooden boards were installed on all sides. Using the supporting function of the boards, landslides can basically be avoided. The planks pull out to prevent leaving marks.

From this point of view, tomb robbery is not something everyone can do. It requires rich knowledge of astronomy and geography, geomantic omen skills, and professional tomb robbery skills.For ordinary people, apart from being able to dig the soil, the rest of the process is really difficult, so there will inevitably be jokes.

A modern tomb robbery gang generally has three to four members, not less than three, and is unlikely to exceed five.These people have their own division of labor.

The tools of modern tomb robbers are much more advanced than before.The general Luoyang shovel has been eliminated, and the shovel used is modified on the basis of Luoyang shovel, which is divided into heavy shovel and lifting shovel (also called mud shovel).Because the wooden pole connected to the back of the Luoyang shovel head is too long and the target is too large, it is discarded and replaced with a threaded steel pipe, which is about half a meter high, and can be nested layer by layer and extended at will.When I usually look at the terrain, I take it apart and carry it in my shoulder bag.

Regardless of official robbery or civilian robbery, the essence is theft.This behavior not only illegally obtained other people's property, disturbed the long rest of the deceased, but also caused the loss of a large number of cultural relics.They will all become eternal sinners and be nailed to the pillar of shame in history.

Warlord tomb robbery is the most brutal
There is a specific historical period for warlord tomb robbery, that is, when the world is in chaos and warlords separatist regimes.On the one hand, this is because the chaotic society cannot stop the behavior of tomb robbery, and on the other hand, the lack of military pay caused by the melee of warlords is the direct cause of their tomb robbery.

Just like Luo Guanzhong wrote in the opening chapter of "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "The world will be divided if it is united for a long time, and it will be united if it is divided for a long time."In the 5000-year long history of our country, there have been many long periods of division.These periods include the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the Three Kingdoms and Two Jins and the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, the Southern Song Dynasty, and the Republic of China period.

During these periods, there emerged a special class in our country that was different from princes and officials but held heavy troops—the warlord class.People in this class have fought in the battlefield for a long time, and most of them have not received high-level cultural education. They are fierce and brutal, have weird tempers, and are murderous.The wars of these warlords promoted the development of our society to a certain extent. For example, during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Qin State unified the whole country after years of annexation wars.However, the successive years of warlords' melee has also brought a great negative impact on society.

Warlords, such people are notorious in history, but warlords have been continuously produced in successive dynasties.Since most warlords belong to warriors, they are not as gentle and indecisive as literati, decisiveness becomes fierce and brutal among them, so judging from the existing historical records, his behavior is basically extremely crazy, yes All the regulations of civilized society are worthless, not to mention the cemetery of the dead.They are often superstitious about ghosts and gods, and they are not afraid of dead ghosts. They don't care about poor ghosts, they like rich ghosts.

The long-term division of the country not only affected the social development at that time, but also the perennial melee between the various divided warlord forces brought huge damage to social production. Many fields were barren due to the war, and many people died due to the war. Many civilians were left homeless due to the war.Not only that, due to the long-term war, the society is basically in a state of anarchy, which leads to serious chaos in social order, and many warlords who rob graves have appeared.

These divided warlords all occupy their own territory and have their own armed forces, and no one dares to restrict their behavior.As a result, these warlords expropriated and extorted money in their jurisdictions and acted recklessly.For their special purposes, some warlords did not hesitate to bear the eternal infamy and became grave robbers.

The purpose of warlords' tomb robbery is much simpler than that of princes.The first type of purpose of their tomb robbery is to raise military pay, the second type is to make money, and the third type is for special psychological needs.In the process of warlords' tomb robbing, sometimes raising military salaries was intertwined with money-making, and sometimes money-making was intertwined with satisfying special psychological needs.

From the fact that the purpose of robbing tombs is to expand military pay, this seems to be something that many warlords have done.If a warlord force wants to maintain its strong position among many separatist forces, it must need a strong army.To cultivate a strong army requires sufficient food and grass, abundant reserve resources, and advanced weapons and equipment. Every item here needs the backing of strong economic strength.Relatively speaking, most of the warlords were not born in palaces and nobles, and they did not have such strong economic strength.Even those warlords who are well-born may not have enough strength to pay for the perennial expenses of a powerful army.As a result, there is a huge contradiction between the needs of the form of war and the actual situation.How to solve this contradiction that every warlord regards as a top priority?In the event of war, many ordinary people who were starved to death would starve to death. How could they spend money to pay the taxes of the warlords?Moreover, wars will inevitably have a negative impact on the social economy, and sometimes large-scale wars can even cause thousands of miles of land to be destroyed.Looting from those wealthy people can only be used for a while.Those wealthy big families will certainly not watch their wealth being robbed. After they discover the signs of robbery by the warlords, they will hide their gold and silver treasures.Therefore, for those warlords who lack military pay, the best way to resolve conflicts is to start with the dead.Tomb robbers don't have to worry about the dead's resistance, nor do they need to worry that the treasure will be hidden. As long as the tomb is dug up, the gold and silver treasures will continue to flow.In order to meet the needs of a large amount of money, most of the tombs stolen by the warlords were those where rich and rare funerary objects were buried.Of course, if they couldn't find the imperial tomb, they would not let go of those small tombs.

(End of this chapter)