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

Chapter 20 "If a worker wants to do a good job, he must first sharpen his tools": Tomb robbery tools exposed (2)
We can imagine that on a dark and stormy night, a tomb robbery team of two or several people used a shovel to dig a hole for one person to go in and out, and sent someone to enter the tomb with a lantern.To deal with wooden burial utensils, the best thing is an axe.The "Huang Chang Ti Pu" respected by the Han people is a wooden structure outside the coffin. It is made of yellow cypress hearts and is very strong.But under the heavy blow of the big axe, it will still become vulnerable.Even if there is a tomb wall blocking it, wherever the iron ax goes, it will still be unimpeded.

The production of iron axes and shovels is made by experienced blacksmiths and repeatedly tempered with fine steel. They are light in weight and moderate in hardness and softness. They will neither break easily because the texture is too hard nor affect the digging effect because the quality is too low. .The handles of shovels and axes are made of hard wooden sticks of appropriate thickness and length.The thickness should be easy to hold; the length should be easy to rotate and chop.

In addition, iron picks and iron chisels made of fine steel are also indispensable "heavy equipment" for ancient tomb robbers to dig holes into the tomb.Iron picks and iron chisels were used to open the coffin and the bricks of the tomb wall. When the tomb robbers entered the tomb, if the coffin was well sealed, they would open the coffin with an axe, pickaxe, and chisel to plunder the funerary objects.

When you enter a tomb that is several meters or even more than ten meters underground, unless you have sharp eyes, you have to use light.Not all tombs are as luxurious and spacious as the tombs of nobles in imperial tombs, where the gold and silver treasures can be seen at a glance.There are many tombs, and due to the passage of time, the coffins have rotted and deteriorated, and some funerary objects are difficult to search for.Experienced tomb robbers will search carefully in the broken soil with bamboo sticks.These treasures are easy to miss without a good eye and bright light.

Among the ancient tomb robbers, the most commonly used lighting tools were torches and candles.Ancient torches are generally made of pine sticks with pine oil or animal fat, which burn for a long time and have high brightness; candles are thicker ones, which burn for a long time and are easy to place.Modern tomb robbers mostly use flashlights and lighters, and the flashlight is a special patrol flashlight.In the deep and long robbery caves and tomb passages, a beam of strong light from a flashlight will give you the feeling of traveling through a time tunnel.If the tomb robber is a literary youth, he must have a lot of emotion to say.The lighter can be used as an emergency. In some small spaces, the flashlight is not useful, and the lighter can be used.

Lighting tools are a must-have for tomb robbers, because the group engaged in this industry belongs to "underground workers", who move at night like mice, and need the help of lights when searching for treasures.Lighting tools are not only convenient for work, but also have an important "life-saving" function. If the phenomenon of "ghost blowing lights" occurs, the tomb robber must escape from the tomb immediately, otherwise he will die of lack of oxygen.

Grave robbery is an illegal act. You can’t stay around the graveyard for a long time. It is easy to expose the target after a long time. Therefore, tomb robbery needs to be quick and simple, so wearing a mouse suit is the best choice.

Mouse clothing is a one-piece suit, which is made of coarse cloth, linen or canvas. It fits tightly and will not be hooked and pulled, not afraid of being scratched, and will not get sand and dust into the body.The tomb robber in the mouse suit moves nimbly, like a nocturnal mouse with a keen sense of smell, using both hands and feet, exploring holes, digging pits, entering the tomb, picking up treasures, and leaving people, with extremely high work efficiency.The onesie is full of little pockets that carry a variety of tools at hand, like an electrician's tool holder.The mouse clothes are all in one piece, looking from a distance, it looks like a cute doll.However, this is not funny entertainment, this is the treasure of the grave robber.

Wearing gloves while wearing mouse clothes is also one of the common tools necessary for tomb robbers.Unless you have Shaolin Temple Vajra Finger and Two-Finger Zen skills, you must protect your hands that make money.If you don’t want your ten fingers to be bruised and your nails to fall off, wear protective gloves and dig with your hands, so that you can do everything you can, and do everything in a clever way.Put on gloves, hold shovel, iron ax, and shovel, and dig like a windmill.If you are in a hurry, you have to leave at dawn.If a thief doesn't leave empty space, he can't work in vain.

All women and children know how to divide the soil sword

Fentu sword is a tool for robbing graves in folklore, and it even reached the level of well-known women and children in ancient China.The origin of Fentu Sword comes from a folklore in the Central Plains.

In the north of our country, there is a large-scale mausoleum of princes and princes, in which countless rare treasures are buried.When the deceased was buried, his family put a luminous pearl in his mouth in order to prevent the corpse from decomposing.This luminous pearl is not ordinary, it is as big as an egg, and its whole body is emerald green, crystal clear.Someone had seen the luminous pearl at night before it was put into the mouth of the deceased, and the light it emitted could be seen even 100 meters away.In order to obtain peace after death and to keep a large number of funerary objects from being stolen by tomb robbers, the owner of the tomb set up many traps when building the tomb, and the tomb is full of hidden weapons.If a tomb robber breaks in, he will definitely be injured by hidden weapons and organs, and there will be no place to bury him.Moreover, the seal of this mausoleum is very huge, and it will not be opened without a large number of people digging.

Because of these anti-theft measures, the owner of the tomb has not been disturbed by tomb robbers for hundreds of years.However, this heavily guarded tomb was easily robbed by a southerner.The magic weapon for this man to win is the earth-dividing sword on his back.After this person came here, he first lived in a village next to the mausoleum.During the day, the villagers saw him walking leisurely, without any abnormalities, and they could not see any strange abilities in him.

But the tomb robber sneaked out of the house in the dead of night.He was wearing a strange night-wear, and he was very flexible in climbing and jumping.Instead of taking the main road, he directly passed the roofs and walls of the villagers, and in a short while he left the village and came to the big tomb.He rushed to the top of the high sealing soil with one stride, then bent down and put his ears to the ground, as if he was listening to something.In this way, he listened carefully on the top of Fengtu for a while, and then stood up easily, with a confident look.He looked around cautiously, and seeing that no one had noticed, he pulled out the soil-dividing sword from behind, and stabbed vigorously in the direction of the tomb passage he had chosen.A strange thing happened, I saw that with the insertion of the sword, the seals on both sides of the sword split rapidly, and after a while, a hole was formed.The man walked down the hole, and with the advancement of the sword, the underground grave soil was also split.In this way, it didn't take long before he successfully reached the interior of the tomb.

He shielded his face with a sword, and carried out a detailed exploration in the tomb.Strangely, none of those legendary organs and hidden weapons happened.After that, he followed the path of "life and death rest" in the Taoist Nine Palaces and Eight Diagrams Formation and came to the front of the coffin smoothly.He didn't hesitate to pry the coffin with the earth-dividing sword.The huge and tightly sealed coffin lid was lightly flicked by him, revealing a gap big enough for a person to penetrate.He dug out the legendary luminous pearl from the mouth of the deceased, wrapped it in a piece of red cloth, tied it tightly around his waist, and retreated according to the "life" path in the Jiugong Bagua formation.When he got to the entrance of the cave, he followed the way he came, and quickly fled the village.

The next day, the villagers were very surprised to see that the southerner hadn't come out of the house. They went to his house to check, where was there any trace?People were surprised by this man's strange behavior. At this time, someone reported that a hole appeared in the seal of the tomb.The villagers ran to the top of the mausoleum to check, and saw that there was indeed a hole on the top of the tomb that could allow one person to enter and exit. The inside was dark and bottomless.Everyone didn't believe that the man could dig this big hole overnight, so they connected his mysterious behavior with the earth-dividing sword on his back.The story of this southerner stealing the Ye Mingzhu with the Dividing Sword spread like this, and it became more and more popular.Later, once the mausoleum was stolen overnight, it was rumored that it was the reason for the Dividing Sword.

In fact, no one has seen the Fentu Sword, so the authenticity of this tomb-robbing tool cannot be verified.Later, some people thought that this kind of legend was extremely unbelievable, but it was just a lie fabricated by skilled tomb robbers to confuse everyone.In addition, in the folklore of our country, there is also a spiral shovel, which is also a special tool for tomb robbers.The screw shovel is used to dig holes and the head of the shovel consists of three sharp plow blades, which is very similar to the structure of the electric fan we use now.The auger also has a screw-shaped earth dumping device on the rear, much like a modern lawnmower.This tool is very convenient. It can not only dig the soil, but also discharge the soil, which improves the efficiency of tomb robbery.When encountering the brick wall of the tomb, you can also use its rotation to break through the tomb bricks.

There are still many folklore such as the earth-dividing sword and the screw shovel, but most of the professional tools used by the tomb robbers in these legends are not scientific, and their authenticity is also very doubtful.

The best way to blow up the tomb
Dynamite is the most powerful grave-robbing weapon, but it is the least commonly used.Without considerable power and the absolute courage to resist outside interference, no one would dare to use earth-shattering explosives to "blatantly blow up the tomb".However, using explosives to deal with ancient tombs is the most effective way.Use a Luoyang shovel to dig out a deep hole the size of a bowl, put in a detonator and explosives, and immediately after detonation, a hole for one person to enter and exit will appear.An explosion is equivalent to several hours of hard work by the tomb robbers.Therefore, dynamite is one of the most respected weapons by tomb robbers and is also one of the most powerful weapons at the bottom of the box. No matter how strong the tomb is, it will bow its head in front of dynamite.

On January 1946, 1, Meihua Mountain near Nanjing was suddenly under martial law, and travel between Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and Ming Xiao Mausoleum was prohibited.Ma Chongliu, the engineer commander of the 21st Division of the Kuomintang Army, commanded the soldiers to transport 51 kilograms of TNT high explosives to the top of the mountain in the dark.These explosives were used to blow up Wang Jingwei's tomb.Due to the rapid fall of the Wang puppet regime, the exterior of Wang Jingwei's tomb has not yet been completed, but the top of the tomb is made of reinforced concrete, which is quite strong.But no matter how hard it is, it is not as hard as dynamite.After research, the engineering troops decided to use explosives to blast the outer concrete and steel tomb shell first, and then destroy the inner cellar of the coffin.

The order to destroy the tomb was issued in mid-January. In the conference hall of the Nanjing Army Headquarters, Army Commander-in-Chief He Yingqin said solemnly: "Wang Jingwei's tomb is buried in Meihua Mountain, juxtaposed with the tomb of the founding father, it is too shameful! If it is not moved away, it will hinder the viewing and hearing of all parties." Then He Yingqin reported the proposal to the National Government that was still in Chongqing as the accompanying capital at that time, and got Chiang Kai-shek's approval.

Everything was ready, there was an explosion that shook the ground, and Wang's tomb was blown open.When the coffin was opened, Wang Jingwei's body was covered with the blue sky and white sun flag, and the body was dressed in a civil official dress, a navy blue robe and a black mandarin jacket, a top hat on his head, and a large ribbon on his waist.In the pocket of Wang Jingwei's mandarin jacket, there was a piece of white paper about 3 inches long, on which was written the four characters "The Soul Comes Back" with a brush.This was written by Wang Jingwei's wife, Chen Bijun, when she was transporting Wang's corpse from Japan.Immediately, Wang's coffin was dragged out of the grave, and his body and coffin were taken overnight to Qingliangshan Crematorium in Nanjing. Within half an hour, the coffin and body were all incinerated.The accompanying officer then ordered the workers to blow air into the furnace, and the ashes were scattered without a trace.Putting aside the political grievances between Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei, from the perspective of national justice, using explosives to blow up the grave of this traitor can also be regarded as a great satisfaction.

The modernization of tomb-robbing tools is not only reflected in high explosives, but the attraction of huge profits has made the tools of modern tomb-robbers more advanced, and the theft technology has more technological content.Tools such as mobile phone walkie-talkies, military compasses, chainsaws and electric drills, radar detectors, etc. are more intelligent, and the damage to tombs is also more serious.

(End of this chapter)