Chapter 20: The Floor Plan Of The Undersea Tomb

Chapter 20: The Floor Plan Of The Undersea Tomb

Sea burial was a type of burial method unique to the coastal peoples, but unlike the Vikings sea burials, the same land burial custom was performed when constructing ancient undersea tombs here. In fact, it was just burying ancient tombs on the bottom of the sea.

Throughout history, there were many people who used underwater ancient tombs for burial. The more famous ones were Concubine Chens Water Tomb in Jinxi and Shen Wansans Underwater Tomb in Yinzibang.

The one I was most interested in was actually Cao Cao's (1). He had seventy-two fake tombs, one of which was rumored to have been found in the Qinglu River in Xuchang.

There were a few legends, and the first two still had clues that could be followed, but you could only get clues to the second one from Pu Songlings Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (2). After reading it, I felt like there was some basis to it, because the content didnt sound like something that people at the time could make up.

Cao Caos tomb in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. The original text of "Cao Caos Tomb" is as follows:

Outside Xucheng, the river was turbulent, and the water near the cliff was deep and gloomy. In midsummer, someone entered the river to bathe and was suddenly cut by an axe; their broken corpse floated up from the water. The same thing happened to another person, which startled people.

Upon hearing this, the town governor sent people to cut off the upper flow of the river. Once the water was exhausted, they saw a deep hole under the cliff, where a wheel with blades as sharp as frost had been placed in the middle.

They removed the wheel and broke in. There was a small tablet inside the hole, with characters written in the style of Chinese seal script. Looking closely at the words, they found that it was the tomb of Cao Mengde. They broke open the coffin, scattered the bones, and took all the gold and treasures.

The writers notes said (3): A poet once said that there would definitely be a real tomb among the seventy-two fake ones, but who knew that the real one wasnt among the seventy-two graves at all? Cao Cao was really cunning! But after more than a thousand years, he still couldnt keep his bones intact. What was the point of being cunning? Alas, Cao Caos wisdom was his own foolishness!

It was possible that Wang Zanghai had built a dam in the seabed area to form a roundabout and then drained the seawater to roughly form a dry piece of land. After that, he dug a huge pit and released the water so they could sail the ship. He then pumped the seawater out again, let the tomb ship could slowly sink into the pit as the water level dropped, and then destroyed the dam to allow the seawater to return.

From the floor plan, the structure of this undersea tomb was very complicated. If they didnt use this method, then they must have used calculus to figure out how to accurately sink the tomb to the bottom of the sea. But that was probably impossible. I couldnt help but think, if the ancients could stop a river from flowing, why couldn't they build a roundabout on the seabed?

I went back and checked the textbook and found that there was a problem ancient people didnt know how to deal with water seepage.

The sand at the bottom of the sea was too permeable, and the manpower and material resources needed to build this kind of dam were several times more than that of the sunken ship.

When I asked an old professor who had taught me before, he thought about it carefully and said that the key should be the huge stone anchors. The stone anchors were distributed in a wide area of the sea, and must have served the same function as cable-tie structures. The countless stone anchors played a role in regulating the ships balance as it sank to the bottom of the sea.

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TN Note:

(1) Cao Cao, courtesy name Mengde, was a Chinese warlord, statesman, poet, and one of the central figures of the Three Kingdoms Period. Wiki link

(2) Refresher: Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio or Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, also called Liaozhai Zhiyi in Chinese, is a collection of Classical Chinese stories by Pu Songling, comprising close to five hundred "marvel tales".

(3) The writer here refers to Pu Songling, the author of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. He sometimes added notes under the tale he recorded.