The headless thousand-year-old mystery of the stone man in front of Wu Zetian's tomb, solved by experts
A thousand-year-old tomb, without a word. Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in the history of China's feudal dynasty, was a legend during her lifetime, leaving behind many mysteries after her death, the most remarkable of which is her wordless monument.
This monument is located in Liangshan, Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province, and is part of Wu Zetian's mausoleum, Qianling. To this day, it still stands there, silently, but it fills people with endless imagination and curiosity.
In addition, the 61 headless stone people in front of Wu Zetian's tomb, their origin and whereabouts have also become a thousand-year-old mystery, which is difficult to let go. Whether it is a wordless tablet or a headless stone man, they are announcing to the world the unique charm and legendary life of this empress.
It is worth mentioning that Qianling does not just belong to Wu Zetian, but the place where she and her husband Tang Gaozong Li Zhi are buried. Although Wu Zetian was on the throne during her lifetime, her relationship with Gaozong has always been very good.
Although Wu Zetian does not have her own separate mausoleum, this is not because of the discrimination against women in feudal society, but because she chose it herself. Although Wu Zetian was originally a talented person of Taizong, in the harem, her relationship with Gaozong has always been stable.
Gaozong's favor and trust in Wu Zetian can be seen from the fact that he took her back to the palace and named her the second rank Zhaoyi, and handed over the power of the court to her. Wu Zetian also gave birth to four sons and two daughters for Gaozong, and the two had a deep relationship.
Under the custom of husband and wife burial together at that time, it is not surprising that Wu Zetian chose to be buried with Gaozong.
The joint burial is Wu Zetian's will, which can be seen from the site selection of the Qianling Tomb. In 683 AD, Tang Gaozong Li Zhi died, and the imperial court immediately began the site selection of the Qianling Tomb.
In this process, Wu Zetian was fully responsible, and specially sent the famous Kanyu masters Li Chunfeng and Yuan Tiangang in the early Tang Dynasty to investigate the feng shui of the mausoleum. The two masters came to the conclusion that Liangshan is high in the north and low in the south, that it is a woman lying on her back on the earth, and that it is a "heroine of great profit", and Wu Zecai ordered the construction.
It can be seen that when burying Gaozong, Wu Zetian had already considered the influence of the mausoleum's feng shui on him, so it can be concluded that since Gaozong's death, she has already planned to be buried with him.
Under the joint governance of Tang Taizong and Tang Gaozong Wu Zetian, the country's economy gradually recovered, the people were able to recuperate, and the national strength of the Tang Empire reached its peak. Since ancient times, funeral rites have been an important part of the Chinese ritual system, and the mausoleum, as the highest power of the country, is often the best reflection of the state of national strength at that time.
The scale of Qianling is large, imitating the pattern of Chang'an City, the capital of Tang Dynasty at that time, the inner city is square, and the main axis of north and south is 4It is 9 kilometers, with a circumference of nearly 80 miles and a total area of about 2.3 million square meters.
The cemetery is divided into the imperial city, the palace city and the outer Guo city, there are two city walls, the inner city has four gates, there are various styles of standard buildings such as the dedication hall, the partial room, the cloister, the que tower in the city, and there are also buildings such as the courtier's statue ancestral hall.
There is also a sacrificial ancestral hall of Di Renjie, the famous minister of the Wu and Zhou dynasties. The various above-ground buildings are majestic and magnificent, and there are many precious burial goods in the underground tombs, and even the legendary Wang Xizhi's "Orchid Pavilion Preface" is also hidden in it.
Although the Qianling Tomb is still magnificent in the wind and rain for thousands of years, the magnificence of this kind of architecture has also attracted countless coveters. In traditional Chinese culture, tomb robbing, which violates the peace of the dead, has always been despised.
However, judging from the history of the tomb robbery industry, the opposition of the dominant culture has not stopped humanity's greed for wealth that does not belong to them. During the Tang Dynasty, the royal tombs were usually heavily guarded, and there were never large-scale thefts in the Qianling Tombs.
However, in the last years of the Tang Dynasty, due to the turmoil of the Tang royal rule, they had no time to take care of the tombs of their ancestors, coupled with years of war and the plight of the people, many people took the risk of stealing many imperial tombs, including Qianling, in order to survive.
During the Huangchao Uprising, the scale of the excavation of the Qianling Tomb was the largest. The excavation was presided over by Huang Chao himself, who directly sent 400,000 troops to Liangshan after occupying Chang'an.
The excavation almost leveled half of Liangshan.
During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, Chang'an was occupied by a number of princes, who tried to steal and excavate the Qianling Tomb. However, since the entrance to the Qianling underground palace was never found, the destruction of these tomb robbers was limited to surface buildings.
So far, the remains of Empress Wu and Gaozong in the depths of the underground palace and countless precious cultural relics have not been revealed and remain intact. The stories about these robberies and excavations are usually full of mystery.
For example, when Wen Tao was excavating the Qianling Tomb, Wen Tao was always exposed to violent storms and rains, but as long as the excavating soldiers stopped, the weather would immediately improve. A similar situation also happened to the warlord Sun Lianzhong during the ** period, when he tried to steal and excavate the Qianling Tomb, he encountered an abnormal weather phenomenon.
At that time, Sun Lianzhong directly used high explosives to blow up the hard rock above the Qianling Tomb Road. However, just when he thought that the entrance to the tomb was about to open, a strong wind suddenly blew in the sky, and many soldiers were blown up and injured by the strong wind, so Sun Lianzhong gave up his pursuit of the treasures and relics in the Qianling Tomb.
Although the legend is just a legend, for thousands of years, the tomb robbers have never been in awe of the spirit of the Empress Wu in the sky, let alone stopped coveting the Qianling Tomb.
However, later experts and scholars conducted an in-depth investigation of the Qianling Tomb and confirmed that the tomb of the Qianling Tomb had never been opened. Until 1960, several farmers in the counties and cities near Qianling fired artillery to blow up stones, and the tomb crossing was accidentally discovered.
Under the instructions of **, Shaanxi Province set up the Qianling Excavation Committee and invited the famous historian Guo Moruo to participate in the archaeological excavation. In April 1960, the archaeological excavation began, and the staff cleared the tomb road that we saw on our tour of Qianling today.
The discovery of this tomb has given people a deeper understanding of the history of Qianling.
The design of the tomb road is ingenious and sophisticated, consisting of two parts: a trench and a stone cave. The trenches were seventeen meters deep and filled with stone strips of almost equal size. Holes were cut between each two stone bars to facilitate the insertion of iron rods.
After fixation, tin iron is also poured to melt the stone strips into one. This design makes the tomb passage tightly seamless, even if a tomb robber accidentally finds the entrance of the tomb, it is impossible to enter the underground palace through the tomb, thus ensuring the peace of Wu Zetian and his wife for more than a thousand years.
As a result, it has been speculated that the disappearance of the 61 headless stone men in front of Wu Zetian's tomb may have been caused by a group of tomb robbers who failed to steal the tomb out of anger.
In the early stage of the construction of Qianling, there were four gates: Vermilion Bird Gate, Xuanwu Gate, Qinglong Gate and White Tiger Gate, and the headless stone statue was placed outside the Vermilion Bird Gate, and the size was no different from that of a real person.
The clothing worn by the stone people has been confirmed by experts to be the clothing of the Hu people at that time. There are also some stone statues on the back, which preserves the remnants of the text left when they were made at the time, and the content is roughly the name of the owner of the stone statue, the position and their ** place.
According to these texts, we can know that most of the owners of these stone statues came from outside the territory, so this stone statue group was named "Sixty-one Fan Chen Statues".
Tang Taizong was honored as the "Heavenly Khan" by many countries, and Gaozong Wu Zetian inherited Taizong's policy of gentleness, and after his death, the leaders of ethnic minorities attended the funeral regardless of the long distance, and Wu Zetian and Tang Zhongzong were deeply moved by this.
In recognition of these loyal people to the Tang Dynasty, they were shaped into stone statues according to the image of these people, some from the Wuzhou Dynasty, some from the Zhongzong Dynasty, and placed in the Qianling Tomb closest to the underground palace.
This fully reflects the openness, inclusiveness and friendly relations of the Tang Dynasty.
So how did the heads of these stone statues disappear? What we know for sure is that the heads of these statues did not disappear at the same time. In the documents of the Song and Yuan dynasties, there are detailed records showing that the head of the stone statue was only partially damaged at that time.
It was not until the Ming Dynasty that people found the collective decapitation of the stone statues in the poems commemorating the trip to the Qianling Tomb. Now, it is generally believed in the academic community that the reasons for the decapitation of stone statues are both natural and man-made.
The Qianling area, located in Guanzhong, is often threatened. The "Jiajing Da**" that occurred during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty was a serious ** recorded in history, and its intensity reached 8 to 8Level 3 with an intensity of 11 degrees has caused serious damage to the local population and customs.
In addition to the stone statue group, other statues in Qianling also collapsed after this **. According to the field research of modern scholars, it is not surprising that the head of the stone statue was relatively fragile due to the construction process of the time, so it was the first part to be destroyed.
Although the Qianling Underground Palace has not yet been opened, tomb robbers and antiquities dealers may have coveted the cultural relics on the ground. In addition, the heads of some statues may have been artificially knocked off and sold for profit, and even used by tomb robbers to vent their anger.
We are deeply saddened by this destruction of historical relics, but fortunately, as early as 1961, Qianling became a cultural relics protection unit under the instructions of ***, and the official excavation has been stopped.
As a result, the tragedy of the headless stone statues will no longer be possible, and the precious artifacts in the underground palace will be rediscovered in due time and in the right way.