The tombs were found by a hospital with a shovel. In December 1971 the army's 366 Hospital, whose grounds sat beside the two saddle-shaped mounds east of Changsha, began digging an air-raid tunnel aimed straight at them; the diggers met creeping 'ghost fire' — phosphorus from old grave deposits — downed tools and refused to go on. The hospital called the provincial museum, which sent a team under Xiong Chuanxin, and the trench was found to have clipped the edge of a Han tomb. Formal excavation of what became Tomb 1 opened on 16 January 1972. It was nearly a hand-dug operation: the budget had been cut from 12,000 to 6,000 yuan, tools were scarce, and factories, soldiers and school students volunteered the labour. The diggers crossed old robbery pits, none of which had pierced the white sealing clay, and sixty working days later — after moving some six thousand cubic metres of earth — the team stood at an intact burial chamber. Tombs 3 and 2 followed in 1973 and 1974. Archaeologists had known the mounds were Han since Xia Nai's survey of 1952; the name Mawangdui, King Ma's Mound, is folk memory of a Five Dynasties prince who was never buried here at all.
From the journal
Three Han tombs and a woman in silk
Three sealed Han tombs were excavated at Mawangdui, Changsha, between 1972 and 1974. The three mounds hold an accidental discovery, a woman in silk and the Han south her tomb goods describe, a working southern economy read like a farm inventory.
In the same city · Changsha ↗The ground that gave way
The silk that survived
The woman of Tomb 1 was the wife of Li Cang, chancellor of the Han kingdom of Changsha, and her burial survived in a way almost no Han grave has. Her name, Xin Zhui — Lady Dai — is known because the tomb's written inventory lay intact. She was in her fifties when she died, and her body, bound tight in layer upon layer of silk, was preserved so well that pathologists could autopsy it two millennia later: death by heart attack, on a diet too rich in sugar and meat, with fresh melon seeds still in her stomach. Over her innermost coffin lay the painted T-shaped silk banner — heaven above with deities and cranes, the earth between with her family offering food to speed her upward, the underworld below where two giant serpents coil around each other. Tomb 3, held to be her son's, matched her splendour on paper and silk: manuscript versions of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching centuries older than any previously known, star texts tracking five planets, medical writings, a painted sheet of exercise postures called a forerunner of tai chi, and three silk maps — topographic, military and administrative — that were, when found, the oldest maps known in China.
What the Han south looked like
Read as a ledger, the tomb goods describe a working southern economy. Tomb 1 alone yielded more than a thousand items, and their catalogue reads like a farm inventory: stored grain — rice, wheat, barley, millet, soy and red beans; fruits and seeds from melon and jujube to pear, plum and bayberry; vegetables including lotus root, mustard greens and ginger; and well over a dozen medicinal herbs, among them cinnamon, galangal and Sichuan pepper, evidence of a settled herbal pharmacopoeia. The animal remains name the larder: twenty-four species, from swan goose, mandarin duck and crane to deer, dog, pig and cattle, and six kinds of fish. A complete meal — soup, rice and meat skewers laid on lacquer — was packed for the journey, and the 184 lacquer vessels beside it record a regional lacquer industry of astonishing finish. Figurines, 162 of them in Tomb 1, stand in for the household's staff. Administration enters through seals: Tomb 2, robbed but legible, gave up three seals naming Li Cang as chancellor of Changsha and first Marquis of Dai, their characters correcting a miswriting in the standard histories. Taxed grain, organised crafts, herbal medicine and a bureaucracy exact enough to keep inventories — the Changsha kingdom at work.