Hanging coffin

Hanging coffin

It is one of the burial styles of ancient minorities in southern China. It belongs to a kind of cliff burial. The coffin can be placed on the cliff, or one end of the coffin can be placed in the cliff cave, and the other end of the coffin can be placed on the stake nailed on the cliff. People can see the coffin under the cliff, so it's named. The project of hanging coffin burial was difficult and costly, which was popular among nobles.

The word "hanging coffin" comes from Gu Ye Wang (519-581) in the Liang and Chen dynasties, who said that there are thousands of hanging coffins on the cliff in the house of the earth Immortals (Volume 47 of Taiping Yulan).

In 1946, when Chinese scholars visited Gongxian County and Xingwen County in Sichuan Province, they began to use this word as a special term.

Hanging coffin burials are widely distributed in Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan, Guangxi, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, Anhui, Hubei and other provinces. They are also distributed in northern Shanxi, mainly in Wuyishan area of Fujian and Gongxian, Xingwen, Junlian, Zhenxiong, Weixin and other counties at the junction of Sichuan and Yunnan. Cliff paintings coexist with Gongxian hanging coffin burial. There are also hanging coffins on the mountain to the north of Taiyuan, Shanxi Province. Just behind Tutang village, opposite to North China University, there is a road leading to the second reservoir of Fenhe River. If you walk along the road to the second reservoir, you can see hanging coffins on the cliff.

Hanging coffins found in different places have different burial utensils and ages. The boat shaped coffins in Wuyishan area of Fujian Province are mostly made of whole wood, belonging to the spring and Autumn period and Warring States period. The funerary objects of Baiya hanging coffin in this area include tortoise shaped wooden plates, hemp, ramie, silk, cotton textile fragments and bamboo mats. Most of the coffins in Gongxian and Xingwen areas of Sichuan Province are rectangular coffins made of whole wood. The top of the coffin is a herringbone slope cover, belonging to the yuan and Ming Dynasties. The funeral objects of luobiao hanging coffin in Gongxian County are mainly clothes, which are decorated with red tape, and the bamboo chopsticks are written with Chinese characters.

Suspension mode

Hanging coffin burial is a special way to dispose of the dead bones, which is mainly distributed in the ancient southern minority areas in China. There are many perplexities in this kind of hanging coffin burial with profound cultural connotation that people can't explain. For example, it is an "elusive" problem that people in ancient times used any method to send coffins with corpses and burial objects weighing hundreds of kilograms into high caves.

Gu yewang, a man of the Southern Dynasty, was probably the first to explain this problem. He called the cliff cave in Wuyi Mountain where the coffin was suspended as "the house of the immortals", which means the place where the immortals were buried. Immortals have the ability to fly through the clouds, so there will be no difficulty in hanging a coffin. Later generations speculated that "cloud is the place where the immortal buried his bones" (Taiping Huanyu Ji), so some caves in Wuyishan also have the reputation of Shengzhen cave, Xianji cave, bone changing rock and so on. "Jishenji" even has such a description: "Wuyishan in Jianzhou, or on the night of wind and rain, hearing the sound of Ma Xiaoguan, and Ming, there is a coffin on the cliff." Immortals are the products of fantasy, and it is strange that immortals, who are said to be immortal, should die like mortals. However, the spread of these statements at least shows that most of the ancients believed that it would be difficult for ordinary people to carry out the strange burial method of floating in the air.

In Tang zhangzhuo's chaoyejinzai, it is recorded that the ancients dug a stone cave to bury the dead in the middle of the Linjiang mountain. The way is to put a rope from the top of the mountain to hang the coffin down. In 1978, Fujian Provincial Museum used this method to take down a complete boat coffin from Baiyan cave of Wuyishan Mountain by putting down a steel rope from the top of the mountain with a pulley. However, the method of hanging coffins practiced by modern people can not solve all the details of the process of placing hanging coffins, such as how to drill holes in the cliff and drive wooden piles to lay the coffin, and how to hook the coffin to the predetermined position. How could the ancients 3000 years ago have enough steel rope to lift hundreds of kilograms?

In 1989, experts from Shanghai Tongji University, Jiangxi and other places cooperated with American scholars from the University of California, San Diego. Using winch, pulley and other mechanical devices, a "coffin" weighing about 150 kg was hoisted into a cliff cave about 20 meters above the surface of Shangqing River in Xianyan, Guixi, Jiangxi Province. The news media and relevant academic journals have reported and published papers, claiming that this move "reproduces the spectacular scene of the ancients lifting the hanging coffin more than 2000 years ago", thus "solving the eternal mystery of China's hanging coffin". In fact, there is no essential difference between the lifting technology of Wuyi hanging coffin and that of Fujian Provincial Museum, but the operation scheme is different. Some commentators point out that because of the social and historical background of thousands of years ago and the people of hanging coffins in South China, there is no strong evidence that the ancients used lifting techniques similar to winches and pulleys. Therefore, it is hard to believe that they have solved this eternal mystery.

Xu Zan of the Qing Dynasty once recorded in his donghuanjicheng that there is a "daoshuiyan" in the Yuanjiang River Basin of Changde, Hunan Province. All the stones stand on the waterfront, winding high and wide. There are ten caves chiseled on the wall, next to juegou. Among them, there are five coffins hidden in one of the caves. It is said that "the old coffin was made of Chenxiang wood". If it is understood that it is made of Chenxiang wood, its weight is naturally too heavy than that of ordinary wooden coffins. How can such a heavy thing be lifted into the cave? Xu Zan once asked the local people for advice, and the local people could only provide the legend of their ancestors. It is said that when the Yuanjiang river rose, the "healthy ghost led the river up". If this is true, then there is a way to lift the coffin from the top of the mountain. That is to say, the water level is raised, and the coffin is carried by ship into the natural cave or the artificial cliff sinus. After the water level is lowered, there will be a peculiar landscape of hanging coffin on the stone wall.

It seems that the above methods have not been tried on the spot by modern scholars, but some people suggest its possibility from the perspective of geomorphic change research. Most of China's hanging coffin remains are located in the mountains and near the water, with a history of at least two or three thousand years (the latest is more than 400 years). In these thousands of years, great changes may have taken place in the river course and landform. For example, the stone walls on both sides of Jiuqu River in Wuyishan, Fujian Province, and Shangqing River, a tributary of Xinjiang River in Xianyan, Guixi County, Jiangxi Province, have been eroded by the river in two or three thousand years. Under the action of long-term natural forces, it is entirely possible for the river water level to drop, so the height of the coffin will not be as high as expected It's so high. In a word, the view that the location of most hanging coffins in South China has been raised due to geological changes is of great significance in the study of hanging coffins.

Referring to the method of burying urn coffins by the ancient residents of Palawan Island in the Philippines, some people put forward another idea: relying on climbing tools such as ropes and long ladders to transport the sacks and plates, funeral objects and necessary coffin making tools one by one to the caves selected in advance, and then make coffins on site and bury them. In addition, according to the investigation of hanging coffin remains in Gongxian County, Xingwen County, Sichuan Province and Songtao County, Guizhou Province, some people pointed out that it was possible for the ancients to set up a plank road to raise the hanging coffin.

Chen Mingfang, an anthropologist who has been investigating the remains of hanging coffins in South China for more than ten years, believes that hanging coffins in South China mostly use the method of "hanging coffins from the mountains". This method is time-saving, labor-saving, simple and easy to operate. It does not need to build more than ten meters or tens of meters of scaffolding, and it does not need to make winch, pulley and other mechanical tools. People in ancient times may not have the intelligence and wisdom in a special field that modern people have (China's hanging coffin burial, Chongqing Publishing House). This is probably the case with the technique of placing coffins from the mountains in China.

As time goes by, the ancients in this area of "intelligence" what kind of technology, naturally, remains to be further explored.

Hanging coffin burial is a kind of peculiar burial style in ancient times: on the Bank of a river, we choose a cliff with a thousand feet standing on the wall, and hang (place) the dead immortal and his coffin at a proper place at the half waist of the cliff in a way we still don't know. The situations of burial sites are different, and the individual ways of burial are also slightly different: or drilling holes in the cliff, rafters as piles, and the foot coffin is placed in the space expanded by the cliff pile; or digging a stone niche on the wall of Yue, and the corpse coffin is placed in the niche; or using the natural rock ditch, rock pier, and rock cave on the cliff to place the corpse coffin When people die, they have to find a home and find a proper way to settle the body that has lost its soul. In this sense, hanging coffin burial is as common as earth burial, cremation, water burial, sky burial and so on. However, with a deep breath, how could a heavy coffin and a cold skeleton "fly" to the high cliff? Who is the owner of the coffin? Our limited wisdom is hard to interpret the fable written by the silence of a thousand years, and we can't escape the shadow of hanging coffin in our nightmare. There is an anecdote: in 1933, a local official surnamed Chen hired two woodcutters to lift two hanging coffins from the cliff of doushaguan in order to explore the mystery of the Bo People's hanging coffins. One of them was transported to Zhaotong provincial No.2 Middle School for investigation and exhibition. Before long, the two woodcutters died unexpectedly. The next year, a disaster relief official named Xiong Tingquan visited the provincial No.2 Middle School in his spare time. He saw the hanging coffin and the remains in the coffin, and inquired about the story of the woodcutter who died miserably. He couldn't sit still and said to the headmaster again and again: "King Wen, how can we play with the remains of the ancients? Please bury it with ceremony. The headmaster had to bury the hanging coffin. Still uneasy, the bear wrote another eulogy: "the frost is sad, the dew is sad, the wind and rain are eroding, the sun and the moon are welcoming him. Who are you? Your bones are strong

Chinese PinYin : Xuan Guan