Huai’an City in our very own Jiangsu Province has recently become the scene for a potentially grisly grave robbing. Did someone dig up the tomb of Han Xin’s mother and attempt to rob it? Local police have opened a case.
The discovery came to light on 22 December, when local people posted online that a 5-metre deep hole had been dug into Han Mu’s Tomb in Huai’an and that the Tomb’s video surveillance had been destroyed.
The Tomb of Han Mu, i.e. the tomb of the mother of Han Xin, a great military strategist in the early Han Dynasty, is a Municipal Key Cultural Relics Protection Site located in Xianfeng Village of Chengnan Township in Jiangpu District of Huai’an.
Mr. Yao is a local cultural relics enthusiast. He specifically chose to visit the Tomb on the Winter Solstice of 22 December when upon he discovered the hole in the ground. White-plaster mud was scattered nearby and Yao said that such was a sealing material for ancient tombs from the late Warring States Period to the early Western Han Dynasty.
As The Paper reports, that material was thus suspected to come from inside the Tomb of Han Mu.
Yao then looked at video of the Tomb that he took on 8 December, and found there too was mud covering the location of the hole, and pieces of white plaster scattered nearby.
“This shows that the tomb was stolen more than half a month ago and the tomb robbers used soil to temporarily block the hole in order to cover people’s eyes and ears”, Yao speculated.
Chen Ping, Cultural Relics Security Administrator for Han Mu’s Tomb, told reporters that last year there had also been an attempted robbery. “The Cultural Relics Bureau installed surveillance cameras before, but then they broke down”, Chen said, adding that the surrounding area was deserted and nothing had been stolen.
As to the latest attempt at grave robbing, investigations have concluded that no cultural relics have been stolen. Authorities backfilled the hole on 23 December, repaired the previously destroyed surveillance cameras and increased the number of cultural-relic managers for the Tomb from one to two so as to strengthen inspections thereof.
