Secrets of the Tang Dynasty: Why 400,000 people couldn’t dig Wu Zetian’s tomb

If you ask which emperor’s tomb in the world is the most difficult to dig, then there is no doubt that it is Wu Zetian’s “Ten Thousand Years Life Domain”-Qianling Mausoleum. Her mausoleum was hacked by swords from the Cold Weapon Age, and bombarded by machine guns and cannons from the Hot Weapon Age. In more than 1,200 years, there were 17 named Qianling Mausoleum thieves, including the largest number of people dispatched at one time. As much as 400,000, almost half of the Liangshan Mountain where Qianling Mausoleum is located was dug away.

However, to this day, Qianling still does not abandon or give up, and like Xu Sanduo, he diligently protects the remains of his master Wu Zetian and her husband Li Zhi. We can't help but ask, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty's Maoling Mausoleum was evacuated, Emperor Taizong's Zhaoling Mausoleum was raided, and Emperor Kangxi couldn't even collect his bones, why could Wu Zetian's Qianling Mausoleum alone be spared?

This matter starts with the construction of Qianling Mausoleum. Qianling Mausoleum is located on Liangshan Mountain, 6 kilometers north of Qian County, Shaanxi Province, and 76 kilometers away from the ancient city of Xi'an. It was built in 684 AD. It took 23 years for the project to be basically completed. Liangshan is a naturally formed limestone mountain with three towering peaks. The north peak is the highest, with an altitude of 1047.3 meters. The second south peak is lower and faces east and west. At that time, the people called it "Nipple Mountain".

Looking from the east to the west of the Qianling Mausoleum, Liangshan looks like a female body lying on its back on the earth, with the north peak as the head and the two southern peaks as the chest. People often say that it is a wonderful symbol of Empress Wu Zetian. Feng Shui masters in the Tang Dynasty believed that Liangshan was good for the heroine.

So Empress Wu Zetian chose Liangshan as the "Ten Thousand Years Life Domain" for her husband Tang Gaozong and herself a hundred years later. After Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty died of illness, Wu Zetian ordered Yuan Tiangang and Li Chunfeng, the great warlocks who were famous in both the government and the public at that time, to select a geomantic treasure land for the emperor. The two traveled to Kyushu separately, and after returning, they both agreed to choose Liangshan in Haoju County (today's Qian County).

Wu Zetian sent envoys to investigate. When they arrived at the top of Liangshan Mountain, Yuan Tiangang said that he had buried a copper coin here, and Li Chunfeng said that he had ordered an iron nail here. When the soil was dug up, Li's iron nails were inserted right into the copper square holes where Yuan had buried them. Everyone present clapped their hands in surprise. Therefore, Wu Zetian chose the site of the mausoleum in Liangshan, which is now Qianling Mausoleum. In terms of Feng Shui alone, Qianling Mausoleum surpasses all the imperial mausoleums of the Tang Dynasty.

When the Qianling Mausoleum was built, it was at the height of the Tang Dynasty and the country was full of power. The mausoleum was large in scale and the architecture was majestic and magnificent. It can be called "the crown of all imperial mausoleums in the past." At the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, Taizong Li Shimin learned the historical lesson that from ancient times to the present, there is no country that will not be destroyed, and there will be no grave that will not be dug.

Starting from the Zhaoling Mausoleum of him and Empress Changsun, he created the burial system of "building a mausoleum based on the mountain". It was designed by the famous art masters Yan Lide and Yan Liben brothers at the time. The mausoleum consisted of a building complex and a sculpture complex. Combined, they are arranged in various places on the mountains with the momentum of "dragon panning and phoenix clouds".

The Qianling Mausoleum of Emperor Gaozong and Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty developed and perfected the shape of the Zhaoling Mausoleum. The cemetery was built imitating the layout of Chang'an City, the capital of the Tang Dynasty, and was divided into the imperial city, the palace city and the outer city. Its main north-south axis was as long as 4.9 kilometers. Documents record that the Qianling Mausoleum was "eighty miles in circumference". The original city wall had two layers and four gates in the inner city. It was called Qinglong Gate in the east, Zhuque Gate in the south, White Tiger Gate in the west, and Xuanwu Gate in the north.

According to the investigation by archaeologists, the inner city of the cemetery is approximately square, with the north and south walls each being 1,450 meters long, the east wall being 1,582 meters long, and the west wall being 1,438 meters long, with a total area of ​​approximately 2.3 million square meters. There are many splendid buildings in the city such as Xiandian, side rooms, cloisters, towers, ancestral halls with statues of Di Renjie and other 60 courtiers, and lower palaces.

As for the treasure inside, after years of exploration and investigation, a cultural relics worker estimated that it is at least 500 tons! On both sides of the front and rear passages, there are four more stone caves, which are full of treasures. The most valuable treasure in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. On both sides of the nearly 100-meter aisle leading to the Vajra Wall are various gold and silver sacrificial vessels.

What interests the world the most is the top national treasure - "Preface to Orchid Pavilion". According to historical records, the "Lanting Preface" in Li Shimin's posthumous edict stated that it was to be placed under his head. That is to say, this treasure should be in Zhaoling, not Qianling.

However, Wen Tao, the governor of Yaozhou in the Five Dynasties, stole Zhaoling, but the list of unearthed treasures he wrote did not include the "Lanting Preface", so in all likelihood, the "Lanting Preface" was hidden in Inside the Qianling Mausoleum. Among the folk rumors around the Qianling Mausoleum, there has long been a theory that Wu Zetian was buried with him in the "Lanting Preface".

Such rich treasures make Qianling Mausoleum like pollen attracting professional tomb robbers, frontier officials, bandits, warlords, and even peasant rebels, who all come to dig with shovels and hoes.

From the moment Wu Zetian lay down in Qianling Mausoleum, Liangshan never stopped. The first person to visit Qianling was Huang Chao, the leader of the rebel army in the late Tang Dynasty. Among all the leaders of the peasant uprising army in the past dynasties, his reactionary degree was second only to Zhang Xianzhong in the late Ming Dynasty.

After this salt dealer led an army of 600,000 to invade Chang'an, he burned, killed and looted heartily. When the bandits had had enough, he suddenly found that he had nothing to do (actually at that time The emperor of the Tang Dynasty was gathering strength to prepare for a counterattack).

At this time, someone told him that there was a large amount of gravel buried under the loess on the west side of Liangshan Mountain. This news hints to Huang Chao that the entrance to the Qianling Mausoleum, the richest among the Tang Mausoleums, is probably on the west side of Liangshan. The rubble is probably the remaining raw materials after the Qianling Mausoleum was built.

Huang Chao was so happy that he immediately mobilized 400,000 soldiers and ran to the west side of Liangshan to start digging. These people were all farmers and were very skilled in the use of shovels and shovels. Soon, half of Liangshan was leveled, leaving a 40-meter-deep "Huangchao Valley".

However, Qianling seemed to have no entrance at all. Later, the Tang Dynasty army gathered to launch a counterattack against Chang'an, and Huang Chao reluctantly fled empty-handed. Huang Chao, who claimed to be a scholar, was extremely stupid. He knew that the Qianling Mausoleum faced north and south.

The emperor of the Tang Dynasty deliberately buried the rubble produced by the construction more than 300 meters away from the entrance of the tomb. In other words, he dug in the wrong direction. It can be seen from this that uneducated people must not become nouveau riche, because money or soldiers are not resources that benefit one party in their hands, but waste people and money and harm the world. of poison.

The second person who extended a sinful hand to Qianling was Wen Tao, the governor of Yaozhou in the Five Dynasties. This person seemed to be born to cause trouble for the tomb of the emperor of the Li and Tang Dynasties. Before the Qianling Mausoleum, 17 Tang imperial tombs had been excavated, and only the Qianling Mausoleum remained.

But his ideals were shattered here. Like Huang Chao, he also mobilized tens of thousands of people to excavate the Qianling Mausoleum in broad daylight. Unexpectedly, he was hit by heavy wind and rain three times when he went up the mountain. As soon as the troops withdrew, the weather immediately cleared up. Wen Tao really couldn't understand what was going on, but he Still not digging any further, I gave up the idea. Qianling thus escaped the second calamity.

The most dangerous thing is the third time. This time it is not a 400,000-strong army, but a modern reorganized division. The tools for tomb robbing are no longer hoes and shovels, but chopping rocks like cutting vegetables. machine gun cannon. The mastermind was Sun Lianzhong, a Kuomintang general during the Republic of China.

He led his men to imitate Sun Dianying’s example of bombing the tombs of Cixi and Qianlong. They buried pots and cooked rice and set up camp on Liangshan Mountain. Under the guise of military exercises, he used black explosives to blast open the three-story stone slabs of the tomb passage. , just as he was about to enter, a burst of thick smoke suddenly appeared, spiraling up and turning into a tornado. Suddenly the sky was dark and the ground was dark, and rocks and sand were flying. Seven Shanxi soldiers were the first to bear the brunt. They immediately vomited blood and died. How could the others dare to go forward? He ran out with a shout.

It is said that one of General Sun’s regiments had very few survivors. Local people spread that "because Wu Zetian was from Shanxi, he hated people from his hometown to dig up her grave, so the seven Shanxi soldiers must die." In this way, Qianling finally escaped the final disaster.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, by chance, several farmers discovered the tomb passage of Qianling Mausoleum. In 1960, Shaanxi Province established the Qianling Mausoleum Excavation Committee and began to excavate the underground palace tomb passages of Qianling Mausoleum on April 3. Excavations show that the tomb passage of the Qianling Mausoleum is located halfway up the mountain southeast of the main peak of Liangshan Mountain and consists of a trench and a stone cave.

The trench is 17 meters deep and is entirely filled with stone strips 1.25 meters long and 0.4 to 0.6 meters wide. The tomb passage is slope-shaped, with a total length of 63.1 meters, wide from the south and narrow from the north, with an average width of 3.9 meters. The stone strips are stacked and buckled along the slope from south to north, with a total of 39 floors, 410 pieces of which are exposed on the plane, and about 8,000 stone strips are used on the 39th floor.

The stone strips are fastened with dovetail-shaped thin-waisted iron bolt plates, and holes are drilled between the upper and lower parts with iron rods to penetrate them. The molten tin and iron juice is poured into the stone strips and melted into one piece with the stone strips. The excavation situation is consistent with the record in the "Old Book of Tang·Biography of Yan Shansi" that "the gate of Qianling Xuanque is closed with stones, and the gaps in the stones are fixed with cast iron." In addition, archaeologists found no signs of robbery or disturbance around the mausoleum, proving that Qianling is the only tomb of a Tang Dynasty emperor that has not been robbed.

Wu Zetian is a person who is good at using time to defeat everything. She entered the palace at the age of 14, first became the queen in 18 years, and then became the emperor in 35 years. It took 1,200 years after her death to prove the sturdiness of her mausoleum and the immortality of its charm.

Even before Mr. Guo Moruo passed away, he still remembered the central government's approval of the excavation of Qianling Mausoleum. It can be said that Wu Zetian conquered the world during her lifetime and conquered history after her death.