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Why is the excavation of Dingling a great tragedy in archaeological history?
"The active excavation of the Ming emperor Wanli Dingling in A.D. 1950 made it more difficult to protect a large number of cultural relics. It is this painful lesson that led to the concept of cultural relics protection in China and did not actively explore the Mausoleum. "

Dingling is the first and only imperial mausoleum in the history of * * * and China, which was planned, organized and actively excavated by the State Council. Its background can be traced back to the mid-1950s, when a group of cultural officials, including Guo Moruo, Shen Yanbing and Wu Han, put forward the excavation plan of the Ming Changling Mausoleum. However, due to its large scale and high difficulty, Dingling, a smaller scale, was first selected for trial excavation.

"The excavation of Dingling has gained a lot. For example, it is unprecedented to find that Ming Taizu is not lying on his back in the coffin, but lying on his side and buried, with his legs slightly bent like the sleeping' Big Dipper'. " Gao said, however, there are many negative consequences caused by excavation: "After the underground palace was opened, many precious organic funerary objects, such as silk, became moldy, hardened and seriously damaged after contacting with the air. The red lacquer coffins made of three golden nanmu used by the emperor and two queens were abandoned and destroyed, and even the remains of the emperor and queen were finally cleaned up.

Due to lack of experience, archaeologists used "polymethyl methacrylate" (plastic) to add softener and daub it on semi-rotten clothes. After a few months, it turned black, hardened and became brittle. In addition, the cultural relics warehouse in those days was too simple, and there was air leakage on all sides, which was far from constant temperature, humidity and light, so that in the archaeological report published later, most silk fabrics could only be in a fragmented and damaged state.

More destructively, during the Cultural Revolution, the archaeologist headed by Xia Nai was forced to leave his post. The imperial tomb, which had been opened, was put on hold like that. Most of the precious fabrics and wood were directly exposed to natural conditions and soon dried up and corrupted. Emperor Wanli's golden nanmu coffin was thrown into the wild and cut into furniture by farmers. The bones of Emperor Wanli and his two empresses were completely destroyed by a fire.

Therefore, due to the backward technical level, easy excavation and difficult protection, many rare treasures have been irretrievably destroyed. Zheng Zhenduo, then director of National Cultural Heritage Administration and director of the Institute of Archaeology of China Academy of Sciences, and Mr. Xia Nai, then deputy director, immediately wrote to the State Council, demanding that the application for excavation of the imperial tomb be stopped immediately, and Premier Zhou Enlai approved this application. Since then, it has become a rule in archaeology not to actively excavate the imperial tombs.

The above are some materials collected and summarized by the master in various places. Generally speaking, in the process of Dingling excavation, due to the backward technical level of cultural relics protection and the lack of relevant experience, coupled with some ideas of "overthrowing royalists" at that time, the precious cultural relics in Dingling after excavation were seriously damaged or even destroyed, so we said "a great tragedy in the archaeological history of Dingling excavation".

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