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The 1000-year-old family tomb almost buried the entire archaeological team alive, causing experts to panic

“Tomb over grave” – unique anti-theft design

In November 2006, police in Xi’an City, Shaanxi Province, China arrested a case of smuggling 129 cultural relics including epitaphs in a Song Dynasty mausoleum. According to the testimony of these people, 129 artifacts were all taken from an ancient tomb nearby, dug up and sold by a man distantly related to the owner of the grave.

The Department of Cultural Relics of Shaanxi Province is already familiar with grave excavations and unexpected tomb discoveries on the construction site, so it did not take long for them to find the scene and prepare for excavation and rescue.

Each mausoleum inside the Lu family cemetery is 7.5-15.5m deep. (Photo: National Geographic).

This is actually a cemetery of nearly 90,000 square meters located in Lam Dien district, Shaanxi province. The tomb area for 5 generations in the Lu family during the Song Dynasty with mausoleums arranged along the axis.



On a central axis from south to north, the tombs of the eldest son and the eldest grandson are arranged along the vertical axis, and the rest are arranged on the horizontal axis.

This tomb system has applied the unique anti-theft design “grave stacked grave”.

Accordingly, the tombs are buried very deep under the hard rock layer, the deepest mausoleum is 15.5m; 7.5m shallowest. The mausoleum is complex with many front, back, and parallel chambers… the upper chambers are usually empty, only the bottom cellar contains coffins and important burial items.

Perspective of the structure of the M2 mausoleum in the Lu family cemetery. (Photo: Chinese Archeology).

This way thieves will have to dig from floor to floor without knowing which is the real one.



Ancient grave robbers with only a hand shovel could hardly dig down to the location of the main tomb. In the event that they can be dug down, they are also easily buried alive by landslides or suffocated from lack of oxygen – poisoning in the mausoleum is often just a lack of oxygen when in the ground for too long.

During the excavation of the mausoleum, the archaeologists themselves were almost buried alive by this ingenious anti-theft trap.

The father of Chinese archeology

When excavating this monumental cemetery, experts have found clues to the big question: Who is this famous family?

This Lu family is the generation of Lu Dai Lam family (1044-1092) – the character of the Song Dynasty who is considered the ancestor of Chinese archeology. Lu Dai Lam was the first Chinese scholar to study bronze and ancient inscriptions, he wrote the books “Archaeology” and “Archaeology of Literature and Translation” as the foundation for the profession of archeology and paleontology in Vietnam. this.



In the books, the scholar Lu draws sketches, catalogs, and writes an introduction (time, place of discovery, size) for the antiquities in a very scientific manner.

Recorded in the book “Archaeology” by Lu Dai Lam. (Photo: Toutiao)

Lu Dai Lam spent most of his life studying Confucianism, in the last years of his life he began to collect bronze, but surprisingly, no bronze objects were found in his tomb.

“There are 70 antiques buried under Lu Dai Lam, most of them are porcelain, we guessed that the bronze items were stolen by grave robbers. However, the rest of the burial items are very sophisticated, responsive to taste. the scholar’s beauty and elegant life,” said archaeologist Zhang Yun.

Exquisite burial items inside the mausoleum at the Lu family cemetery. (Photo: Toutiao)



Although this tomb has been repeatedly broken into and plundered by modern thieves – most of whom are descendants of the clan -, archaeologists are still lucky to find more than 600 exquisite artifacts. Funeral items include ceramics, porcelain, bronze, gold, silver, lacquer… most of which are used for daily life. They partly reflected the living conditions of an aristocratic family during the Song Dynasty.

A large number of tea tools were also unearthed, indicating that tea was a popular drink among the nobility of this period.

In the tomb of Thien Dung – Lu Dai Lam’s granddaughter, a silver box containing red powder was unearthed. Experiment results show that this is a type of women’s makeup blush, after 1000 years, the ingredients in the powder have not been changed.

Illustration