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

Chapter 42 The Sixth Wave of Tomb Raiders: Tomb Raiders in Modern Times (1)
Bandits Robbing Wanniang's Tomb

A person, no matter how prominent his status was, how wise and wise he was, how domineering and domineering he was, it is impossible to predict what will happen after him.A hundred years later, maybe his good name will be exiled for a hundred generations, and maybe his notoriety will be passed down for thousands of years.Regardless of whether it is a good name or notoriety, as long as it is buried in a tomb, it may attract the attention of tomb robbers. The tomb of the ancient emperor's home is especially favored by tomb robbers.What this section is talking about is the tomb of Wan Guifei, the favorite concubine of Emperor Xianzong of the Ming Dynasty, located 7 kilometers northwest of Changping County.

Concubine Wan Gui, named Wan Zhen'er, was a well-known concubine in the Ming Dynasty. She was selected into the palace from various cities in Shandong at the age of four, and later served as the maid of honor for the Empress Dowager Sun (grandmother of Ming Chenghua Emperor Zhu Jianshen).After she became an adult, she was favored by the crown prince Zhu Jianshen, and the two secretly communicated with each other, and had an affair between a man and a woman.Wan Zhen'er's service to Zhu Jianshen was very considerate, which greatly comforted Zhu Jianshen's wounded heart when he was a child.As Zhu Jianshen grew older, he actually developed feelings for this caring maid.Therefore, before Zhu Jianshen succeeded to the throne, Wan Zhen'er had already become the princess.When Zhu Jianshen came to the throne at the age of 18, Wan was already a 35-year-old mistress. Because she was born delicate and beautiful, and had good looks, she has always been favored by Zhu Jianshen.The Wan family is domineering and domineering because of their exclusive favor, and does whatever they want, even the dignified queen is afraid of him.All his life Wan liked to play with hawks, and liked the bloody smell of hawks pecking at living things. In order to please him, the emperor issued an edict to distribute the mission of recruiting eagles to all parts of the country. For a time, Wan's deep palace was full of eagles.Because of Wan's good service, the emperor found the fault of Empress Wu and took the opportunity to depose her and made Wan's queen.Later, because the ministers tried their best to persuade them, they failed.

From being a concubine at the age of 35 to her death at the age of 59, no one in the sixth palace can match her favor.It is bizarre that at the age of 17 years older than the emperor, he was favored all his life in the harem where Israel is a seductive person, and the color is fading and loves to relax.Concubine Wan Gui should be content to be favored by Emperor Xianzong of the Ming Dynasty for a lifetime.Although she did not become the queen due to the opposition of the officials, her power is definitely greater than that of the queen, and she is also much happier than the queen.But she was still not satisfied, and even openly challenged the queen by relying on the emperor's love for her.Once, Empress Wu, the official palace of Emperor Xianzong of the Ming Dynasty, had a quarrel with Concubine Wan Gui.Concubine Wan Gui wantonly slandered Empress Wu in front of Ming Xianzong.Ming Xianzong's love for Concubine Wan Gui made him completely believe in Concubine Wan Gui's words, and he put Empress Wu into limbo without investigating the matter.Empress Wu's father was also implicated in this.From then on, no one in the palace dared to offend Concubine Wan Gui again, and even the later king and empress had to do everything possible to curry favor with Concubine Wan Gui in order to keep her post.

Why did Ming Xianzong accept a woman who could be his elder as his concubine?With the appearance of a middle-aged woman, how can Concubine Wan Gui only favor the Jiaofang?This also starts from Ming Xianzong's rough boyhood.

Ming Xianzong Zhu Jianshen was the son of Ming Yingzong.Zhu Jianshen was established as the prince at the age of two, but at this time the prince not only did not have half the honor of the crown prince, but was in constant fear, like a prisoner, because his father Ming Yingzong had been captured by Oala during the "Civil Change" in 1449 , his uncle, Emperor Jingtai, ascended the throne.Soon, Emperor Jingtai abolished Zhu Jianshen as the prince and replaced his son as the prince.As a prince, Zhu Jianshen lived a precarious life, and everyone around him was indifferent and rejected him. There was only one person who really cared about this deposed prince, and that person was Wan Shi, the court lady who had taken care of Zhu Jianshen since he was the prince. That year, Zhu Jianshen was two years old and Wan Shi was 19 years old.Wan never left Zhu Jianshen, a young man, and went through eight difficult years together through thick and thin and wind and rain. In 1457, Ming Yingzong regained the throne from Emperor Jingtai, and Zhu Jianshen's life turned around, and he was once again established as the prince.

In 1465, 18-year-old Zhu Jianshen ascended the throne as emperor, and immediately made 35-year-old Wan Shi his concubine.Soon, Wan gave birth to a son, but he died before the full moon.Since then, Wan Shi has not been able to give birth again.Wan Shi, who wanted to become a queen, was insane, so she didn't want to see the women in the harem give birth, so she tried every means to occupy Ming Xianzong, and even killed other concubines who were pregnant with dragon heirs.All pregnant concubines in the harem had miscarriages for no apparent reason.Everyone in the harem turned pale when they heard the word "pregnancy".However, the ministers of the imperial court saw that the emperor had been on the throne for many years and still had no heirs. They thought it was because the emperor favored the Wan family.Xianzong also listened to the opinions of the ministers, but still no heirs were born.Everyone except Ming Xianzong knew that it was Concubine Wan Gui who did it, but Wan's not only favored the Six Palaces, but also was powerful in the government and the public, no one dared to report to Ming Xianzong.

Once, Xianzong was playing in the palace and saw the beautiful and intelligent maid Ji, so he stayed overnight.Afterwards, Ji became pregnant.After hearing the news, Wan Shi, who favored the harem, ordered a court lady to abort Ji.However, not everyone is as cold-blooded as Wan Shi.Seeing that Ji's nature is weak and sympathetic, the court lady falsely reported that Ji was a "sick ruffian" and not pregnant.Concubine Wan Gui was still worried, and ordered the Ji family to be relegated to the cold palace.This is how the Ji family secretly gave birth to Zhu Youtang in the cold palace under the shadow of Concubine Wan Gui.Concubine Wan Gui sent Zhang Min to drown the new prince after learning about it, but Zhang Min risked his life to help Ji hide the baby secretly and feed it with rice noodles every day.Empress Wu, who had been ostracized by Concubine Wan Gui, also helped feed the baby.In this way, Zhu Youtang was secretly raised until he was six years old.

One day, when Zhang Min was combing Xianzong's hair, Xianzong sighed and said, "I am old and have no heirs!" Zhang Min hurriedly said, "Long live, I have a son." true love.Emperor Xianzong was overjoyed when he heard this, and immediately ordered to pick up the prince.When Emperor Xianzong first saw his emaciated son whose fetal hair had not been cut and dragged to the ground due to long-term confinement, he burst into tears and named him Youtang.On the same day, all the ministers were summoned to tell the truth.The next day, an imperial edict was issued to the world, making Zhu Youtang the crown prince, and making the Ji family the concubine Shu.But then the Ji family died violently in the palace, and the gate supervisor Zhang Min also committed suicide by swallowing gold.Obviously, the deaths of Concubine Ji and Zhang Min are directly related to Concubine Wan Gui.Xianzong's mother, Empress Dowager Zhou, was worried that Concubine Wan Gui would kill the prince, so she personally adopted her grandson in her Renshouguan, so that the prince could live safely in the palace.

Even so, Wan Shi still did not give up.Once, when the Wan family invited the prince to dinner, the Queen Mother of Zhou warned: "After you go, don't eat anything." Therefore, the prince did not eat any food when he went to the banquet, and only said that he was full.When the palace servants offered the soup, the young prince said, "I suspect there is poison in it." After hearing this, Wan was very annoyed.Shouted: "This child is only a few years old, and he will harm me in the future!" After that, she changed her control over the life of Xianzong's harem, and the concubines could be born smoothly, and the number of princes gradually increased.Concubine Wan Gui wanted to use this to coerce the emperor to appoint another prince and abolish the position of the crown prince.Xianzong had always obeyed Concubine Wan Gui's words, so he intended to replace the prince, but the officials in the court strongly opposed it.At this time, an earthquake suddenly appeared in the area of ​​Mount Tai. The fortuneteller pointed out that the reason for the earthquake was that the heaven warned that if the crown prince was changed, it would cause turmoil.

Although Concubine Wan Gui did many bad things, she was very lucky and died in front of Ming Xianzong.In the 23rd year of Chenghua, Concubine Wan Gui, who was already 59 years old, beat a court lady angrily for a trivial matter, but because of her obesity, she couldn't catch her breath, fainted, and never woke up again.

Emperor Xianzong of the Ming Dynasty was really an infatuated man. He reigned for 23 years and always favored Concubine Wan Gui.After the death of Concubine Wan Gui, Emperor Xianzong of the Ming Dynasty was very sad, crying tears.Not only did he violate the ancestral system for Concubine Wan Gui to quit court for seven days, but he also broke the funeral system of the Ming Dynasty and insisted on burying Concubine Wan Gui in the emperor's cemetery in spite of the civil and military opposition of the Manchu Dynasty.Apart from the martyrs, Concubine Wan Gui was the first concubine to enter the Ming Tombs area.He also built a very luxurious mausoleum for his concubine, and buried countless rare treasures with him. This is what later generations call the "Wanniang Tomb".

After the death of Concubine Wan Gui, Emperor Xianzong of the Ming Dynasty became ill due to depression because he missed Concubine Wan Gui.
At the foot of Mount Su in Changping, Beijing, there is a huge Wanniang Tomb, which is the tomb of Concubine Wan Gui.Wanniang Tomb faces south and is composed of two parts: the ground building and the sealing soil.The ground building park is 138 meters deep and 197 meters wide. In the park, there are Xiangdians with five rooms in width and three rooms in depth.The hall of enjoyment and the garden walls with cornices, warped tiles, carved walls and glazed walls are truly magnificent.The sealing soil is in the shape of a covered bucket with a diameter of 14 meters.

Wanniang's tomb faces southeast from the northwest, and the overall layout is round in front and round in back.The square courtyard is 197.8 meters wide and 138.5 meters deep.There are halls of enjoyment in the garden, which are five rooms wide and three rooms deep.The hall of enjoyment and the garden walls with cornices, warped tiles, carved walls and glazed walls are truly magnificent.The sealing soil is in the shape of a covered bucket with a diameter of 14 meters.The garden bed is in the shape of a human head.The front bed is square, and the two sides of the back are adducted into a semicircle, which is slightly different from the East and West wells.The outer walls and gate towers are basically well preserved, with a length of 197.8 meters from east to west and a width of 138.5 meters from north to south.There are three gates, one main gate, and a gate tower built on it, with a height of 5.35 meters, a width of 3.23 meters and a depth of 2.1 meters.There is a tuck gate 6.15 meters away from the main gate on both sides, with a width of 2.77 meters.The front bedroom is 138.5 meters long from north to south, and 106.7 meters wide from east to west. The garden wall is made of big city bricks.The garden wall surrounds the Xiangdian and the two verandas with an inner wall, 4 meters long, 1 meters wide, 71.2 meters high and 47.58 meters thick.Front and rear doors.The heavy gate is 2.35 meters wide and 0.75 meters deep (there may be three heavy gates).The hall of enjoyment is five rooms wide and three rooms deep. The foundation stones of the pillars are well preserved.The third door leads to the back half of the garden bedroom, a door with a width of 16 meters.The back of the garden bedroom is shaped like a second well, 3.6 meters wide and 2.88 meters long.There is a screen wall 89 meters away from the gate, which is 90.8 meters wide, 6.35 meters thick and 5.1 meters high.The lower part is made of green glazed bricks, the upper part is made of glazed bricks to form the eaves, and the center is inlaid with three layers of square bricks.After that, there is a stele without characters, 0.5 meters high, 2.1 meters wide, and 2.2 meters thick, with clouds and phoenix patterns carved on the forehead of the stele.The base of the stele is girdle-shaped, with two phoenixes carved on the front and back sides, a broken word cloud in the middle, and two phoenixes carved on the girdle part, with a cloud and phoenix pattern on each side.Later, a stone confession was placed, 0.93 meters long and 0.27 meters wide. Most of them have sunk into the ground, and the five confessions have been lost.Then there is the grave mound, with a residual height of 2.23 meters and a diameter of about 1.05 meters.The rear garden wall is 2.5 meters high and 14 meter thick. The lower part is built with big city bricks on both sides, and the middle is sandwiched with stone plaster. It is 3.5 to 1 meters high. The upper part is built with mountain stones. A horizontal brick is erected in the middle, and the two sides are filled with broken bricks and plastered to form a ridge shape.The inner and outer walls of the cemetery are plastered with one centimeter thick plaster, and then painted with red powder.

In the Ming Dynasty, officers and soldiers were set up to guard and managed by officials.After the Qing Dynasty was changed to guarding the grave households, the grave guards and their families lived in the first courtyard of the garden bed, and after generations multiplied, a village was formed.Later, due to the small size of the courtyard, the dwellings were expanded outside the courtyard in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, forming the current village pattern.

However, no matter how favored and honored Concubine Wan Gui was during her lifetime, she certainly never thought that she would end up being dug up and murdered after death.

In 1923, the local bandit Hou Xianwen led 18 people to excavate the Niangniang Tombs in Deling and Dongjing, but failed due to the small number of people.After the incident, Hou Xianwen was arrested and imprisoned, where he died for the rest of his life. In the autumn of 1944, Cheng Laoliu of Changlingyuan Village gathered a team of more than a hundred people, calling himself Cheng Liuye, and occupying the mountain as king.He retook the old road of Hou Xianwen back then, and in the middle of the night, he secretly pulled the team to the tomb of Concubine Wan Gui, and began to dig separately.After three days and nights of planing, digging, chiseling, and blasting, the top of the tomb was finally penetrated, and all the funeral objects of Concubine Wan Gui were robbed.Cheng Laoliu found six horses and carried the gold and silver artifacts to Changlingyuan Village overnight to divide the spoils.Each soldier was given 6 tael of gold and 1 orbs, and each official was given a gold pot or utensils equivalent to a gold pot. Cheng Lao Liu naturally swallowed the precious treasures.

On the second day after the tomb robbery, Cheng Lao Liu held a big wedding.The vehicles used are mighty, and countless pigs and sheep are slaughtered. Its majesty and ostentation are rarely seen by the local people.At the banquet, Cheng Laoliu's daughter-in-law wore a gold-topped phoenix crown stolen from the tomb, arrogantly, as if the concubine Wan Gui was reborn, with the air of a queen.

It's a pity that the good times didn't last long.Half a year later, Cheng Laoliu clashed with the Kuomintang garrison until the scuffle and was shot to death in the Hetao of the nearby Gongbuchang village.A rebellious son in troubled times will eventually be punished by heaven.

Doujitai Ancient Tomb Excavated

The evil tomb robbery activities did not subside because of the passage of time, but intensified instead.This kind of tomb robbery has spanned thousands of years and continued into modern times.

In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, the political situation was turbulent and the world was very chaotic.The establishment of the Republic of China did not bring peace to the whole country, and the people were still in dire straits.Instead, the various political power groups in the country relied on their own territory and strength to compete with each other, and wars continued frequently, forming a situation of warlord separatism.At that time, even the safety of the living could not protect themselves from the harm of hunger, cold, plague, and war. Who could take into account the safety of the dead in the mausoleum.These warlord forces, each dominating one side, acted independently without a unified leadership.The national government was unable to pay the military salaries of these troops, and naturally it could not restrain their actions.However, if any warlord wants to expand his strength and rule the roost, he can only rely on himself.Raising military pay has become the top priority of the warlords' work.At that time, the warlords, big and small, racked their brains in order to raise military pay, expand their strength, and make themselves rich. They really racked their brains and tried every possible way.Among the methods they thought of, the most worry-free, time-saving, and labor-saving one was tomb robbery.After all, it is much easier to kill people for ideas than to search for them directly from living people.Moreover, the social economy was severely damaged by the war at that time, and it was true that there was nothing to gain from living people.During this period, the treasure-robbing case of the Fighting Cock Terrace occurred, which shocked China and foreign countries.

Baoji, Shaanxi, was called Chencang before the Tang Dynasty. It was the birthplace of the Zhou and Qin dynasties and the cradle of the Zhou and Qin cultures.Ancient Chencang is today's Doujitai area. It is about 7 kilometers east of Baoji City, bordering Weibei Plain in the north and Weihe River in the south.The Temple of Mrs. Chen Bao (commonly known as Niangniang Temple) built by Qin Wengong to worship the Emperor of Heaven is located on this platform, so it is also called Jiji Terrace.

Ancient Chencang has a pivotal position in history. It is not only an important city in the Zhou Dynasty, but also the capital in the early years of the Qin Dynasty. Therefore, there are extremely rich and splendid treasures created by the working people in ancient my country buried underground. an important area.In this area, there is a small natural village named Daijiawan. In the north of the village, there is a Daijiagou that runs from the Jiacun Plateau to the Weihe River in the south, more than ten feet deep and seven or eight miles long.Local people often see that after heavy rains and floods, many ancient cultural relics are exposed on the edge of the earth cliff, and many of them are of the highest quality.Although people don't know its dynasty and name, they all know that it is a valuable antique treasure, so they call it "treasure".There are indeed treasures in the Daijiawan area of ​​the cockfighting platform.This is determined by its special historical and geographical reasons.According to "Historical Records", the tombs of Qin Wengong and Qin Xiangong of Qin State are here.As early as the end of the Qing Dynasty, important bronze cultural relics were unearthed here.

At the end of the 20s, there was a folk song circulating in Baoji, Shaanxi: "The gangster, the emperor, sent bandits to live the king of hell; the king of hell commanded the poor to dig the treasure, and raised his feet to kill people. Eight months of cockfighting to dig treasure is true. It hurt the people!"

"Dang kidnapper" is Dang Yukun, the mastermind and instigator of the Doujitai treasure robbery case.Dang Yukun is from Fuping, Shaanxi, also known as Dang Yukun.Because of his lameness when walking, he was called "Dang kidnapper" by the locals.He has been ignorant since he was a child, hated reading poetry and books, and was unwilling to engage in housework and productive labor. He hung out with a bunch of local hooligans all day long, eating, drinking, whoring and gambling, and doing everything.He started to wander around when he was a teenager. He once worked as an apprentice in antique shops in big cities such as Xi'an and Beijing. He saw many cultural relics and was taught by some antique dealers. device.He is cunning, cunning, cunning and fickle, and he especially likes to gather crowds to gamble.Dang Yukun has a stubborn nature, and fights with others at every turn. Killing and stealing goods has become a common occurrence for him.His lame leg was injured by his opponent when he was fighting fiercely, which left the root of the disease.

Later, Dang Yukun discovered that the warlords had powerful power and economic strength, so he decided to join the army.At first, he took refuge in Guo Jian, a local warlord and leader of the Yasukuni Army entrenched in Fengxiang, Shaanxi.Dang Yukun started as a small soldier, because he was very good at drilling camps and knew how to match his superiors' preferences, so he was more appreciated by Guo Jian, and he was quickly promoted to the ranks of platoon commander, company commander, battalion commander, regiment commander, etc. .But the good times didn't last long. In August 1921, Feng Yuxiang purged the warlords in Shaanxi. Guo Jian was killed by the Northwest Army for disobedience.

Dang Yukun immediately lost his backing, so he had to lead some remnants of the defeated generals to flee to Liquan County, Shaanxi to station.Soon, Li Si was ordered to transfer to the east, and the local troops who stayed in Fengxiang were fighting each other and falling apart.Dang Yukun took advantage of the vacancy, and led his troops back to Fengxiang again in February 1926.In order to strengthen his momentum and show his prestige, he proclaimed himself "teacher commander" and "commander".

(End of this chapter)