Since ancient times, many emperors pursue immortality and immortality of souls, and they wish to borrow another five hundred years from the sky. Even if they fail to live forever, they still hope to be resurrected after death. In the ancient Chinese concept, the soul of a person will still exist after death. One of the three souls of a person is responsible for guarding the corpse, that is, guarding the corpse soul. If the corpse is not corrupt, this soul will remain.
If the corpse is still in the body, the soul may return to the body and be resurrected. This is why the ancients set new highs in the anti-corrosion technology of corpses. In addition to the complex production process like Egyptian mummy , the ancient Chinese also infused mercury into the corpse and made anti-corrosion coffins, and developed various anti-corrosion liquids to soak the corpse. The most luxurious one is the golden jade clothes.
Golden thread jade clothes are also called "jade box" and " Jade ". They are the highest-standard funeral clothing in the Han Dynasty , with the same appearance as the human body.
Tao Hongjing "Famous Doctors" records: "In ancient times, those who have been sent tombs and saw corpses as if they were alive, all of them had gold and jade inside and outside the belly. The Han Dynasty used pearl robes and jade boxes to make them immortal." This means that in ancient tombs excavated since ancient times, if there were corpses that did not rot, most of them had gold and jade inside and outside. The ancient Chinese believed that jade was the "mountain elite". If gold and jade were placed in the nine orifices of human beings, the essence of human beings would not leak out, and the bones would not rot, which could be reborn in the next life. Therefore, it was used as ritual instruments . Early jade was mainly used in funerals.
Before the Han Dynasty, they used jade pieces to make masks attached to the corpse. It is called "jade-encrusted decoration". Perhaps the ancients believed that this could not guarantee that the body would not be corrupt, so in the Han Dynasty, it evolved into Jade Clothes , which wrapped the body of the body.
A complete set of jade clothes consists of six parts: a hood, upper body, sleeves, gloves, trousers and shoes. They are all made of jade pieces and are woven with gold wire. There is a jade eye cover and a nose block on the head of the jade clothes, and a genital cover box and anal plug on the lower abdomen. The edges are locked with red fabric and the trousers are wrapped with iron bars to strengthen and mold. The face cover is covered with a slashing shape, nose, and mouth, the chest and back are wide, and the hips and abdomen will also make bulges according to the body shape, just like a complete human body shape.
So far, more than 20 pieces of jade clothing have been found across the country. The production of jade clothing is a very complicated process. The jade material used must be cut, saw blade , polished and drilled.
The size and shape of each jade piece must be carefully prepared and carefully processed. It is determined that some saw joints on the jade sheet are only 0.3 mm and the drilling diameter is only 1 mm. The process is complex and the precision is so high that we have to be amazed at the manufacturing technology of the ancients. The manpower and material resources spent on the entire jade clothing production process were quite amazing. It is estimated that a jade clothing was made in the Han Dynasty. It takes about ten years for a jade worker to take.
So why were the ancients willing to use such time-consuming, labor-intensive and expensive corpse anti-corrosion technology? Is it just to show your noble status?
In " Shuowen Jiezi ", it says that "the spiritual witch uses jade to decorate the body", which means that people think that jade can communicate with gods and has spirituality. In ancient mythology, Nuwa uses colored stones to repair the sky. The fragments of this colored stone are said to be jade. Jade as a ritual vessel first appeared in the Neolithic period. Jade was used in large quantities during the Zhou and Qin periods. Jade during the Han Dynasty was mainly used as a burial object, and then in the later period, the effect of jade as a sacrifice gradually decreased.
The ancients believed that jade is the essence of mountains and rivers. Since ancient times, jade has had a sacred and irreplaceable position in traditional Chinese culture. The "Water Classic Notes" says that Kunlun Mountain is a mountain of heaven, living in "hundred gods". There are Jiujing and Yumen in the mountain, and the wells are all made of jade. There are various jade trees on the mountain, which are food for gods.
Eastern Jin Ganbao "Su Shen Ji" says that Yang Boyong planted a bucket of stone in Zhongnan Mountain. A few years later, white jade was born on the stone, and later he obtained five pairs of white jade in the jade field. Therefore, in the eyes of the ancients, jade was not an ordinary object, but a spiritual object.
Taoist believes that jade can communicate with spirits and can make people ascend.Han Guo Xian "Hanwu Cave Ming Ji " records: "The goddess kept Wang Chai and the emperor, and the emperor gave him Zhao Jieyu ." Later, "After he was out of the box, a white swallow flew into the sky." Ge Hong also said: "I used the blood of the black insect to stain jade as water to take it, so I could ride the smoke up and down." These Taoist figures regard jade as a elixir that can make people become immortals, which further added the fantasy color of jade.
Chinese ancients also believed that jade is the essence of the penis, and it prolongs life and prolongs life. "Those who take gold live like gold, and those who take jade live like jade." Since the Qin and Han dynasties, alchemists have used elixirs and jade chips as "immortal recipes" to prolong their lives. So in the eyes of the ancients, jade can be eaten.
"Shan Hai Jing" says: "On the mountain, Dan water comes from it, and there are many jade pastes, which are boiling soup, Huangdi is food. Where the jade pastes come from, the jade color is clear, the five flavors are sweet, the chestnut is precise, the luster is bright, the five colors appear, to harmonize softness and hardness, the ghosts and gods in heaven and earth are food and to eat, gentlemen accept it to prevent evil."
This passage talks about the legend of Huangdi eating jade to ward off evil. Since Huangdi, there has been a precedent for eating jade. The ancients believed that eating jade could live forever and become an immortal, so there has been a saying that eating jade has been made since then.
0 The "Shennong Bencao Jing" during the Qin and Han Dynasties recorded that jade can "moisten the heart and lungs, help the throat, nourish the hair, nourish the five internal organs, stop irritability, and reassure the soul."
Ming Dynasty Li Shizhen records that "the jade chips are sweet and flat, non-toxic" and are mainly used to treat "relieve heat in the stomach, wheezing and fullness, and quench thirst".
Since Huangdi, all kings of all dynasties have admired jade, and there are many people who eat jade, the most representative of which is Emperor Wu of Han. Seeking immortals and asking for the Tao and immortality are also the pursuit of the emperors of the Western Han Dynasty. Emperor Wu of Han heard the story of the ancients "pretending jade" and believed that eating jade could make an immortal, so he built an extremely huge Bailiangtai in Jianzhang Palace. A celestial girl held a huge "dew plate" to receive the nectar rewarded by God. The jade balls made of nectar and jade chips are the immortal pills for immortality.
After the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the trend of eating jade was prosperous, and the theory of taking jade was increasing. "Baopuzi·Nianzi·Immortal Medicine" records: "If you don't use a finished tool, it will be useless to hurt people. You should get a rough jade, so you can use it." "The jade can be transformed into water by black rice wine and elm wine, and it can be removed into a platform by scallion, or it can be baited into pills, or it can be burned into powder." "It is advisable to take it once every ten days." After taking it, "do it washes the hair and wash it in the cold water, and walk in the wind, so that it will not cause heat." In other words, jade is not eaten randomly, and it is not something you can eat by grinding it into powder. According to Ge Hong, the formula, dosage and method of taking it is necessary, otherwise it will be poisoned.
Based on these ancient people's understanding and ideas about jade, it is understandable that the ancient people used jade to bury it with them and even made it to hope that the body will not rot.
1968 Archaeologists discovered the joint tomb of King Jing of Zhongshan and his wife on a small hill in Mancheng County, Hebei Province, and two sets of gold-thread jade clothes were unearthed in the curtain. So does such a rare treasure really preserve the tomb owner's body without rotting?
On the corpse position of Liu Sheng and his wife's coffin, there are only many small jade pieces scattered. After the restoration of archaeological experts, the jade clothes we see are restored. This is the first time that the golden thread jade clothes unearthed in my country. We know that the fixing of the jade clothes is gold threads and will not rot. But what is even more puzzling is: Why are there only scattered jade pieces, and where did the bones go? Did he really ascend? Later, when cleaning up the golden jade clothes, I found that there were some brown ashes and fragments of the enamel shell of the teeth.
It turns out that because the price of gold-wire jade clothes is expensive, it often attracts more tomb robbers, especially at the rebellion between the Han Dynasty, the management of the tombs is slack, giving tomb robbers a great opportunity to steal gold-wire jade clothes. The tomb robbers at that time did not have any artistic appreciation level and felt that jade pieces were not easy to take action. However, the gold wires linked to the jade pieces on the jade clothes were gold, so they only took these gold wires. However, the tomb robbers did not have the time to remove the stitches for the tomb owner. After all, the time for tomb robbers was tight, and since the golden jade clothes were all tailored based on the figure of the tomb owner, they were too fit and fixed very firmly, it was impossible to take them off directly.
So the tomb robbers dragged the corpse out of the coffin and burned it directly. After burning the corpse, they could successfully remove the jade clothes. Therefore, the tomb owner's corpse naturally disappeared.
What these noble tomb owners never expected was that the golden jade clothes made by the golden wisps that cost a lot of jade pieces and gold wires and worked hard to make their own and material resources not only failed to immortalize the corpse, but instead made the corpse die.
In view of this, in 222 AD, Emperor Wen of Wei Cao Pi ordered the ban on the use of jade clothes. The dream of hoping that jade would be resurrected was shattered, and the jade burial culture of the Han Dynasty was also covered with dust.
