Mawangdui (马王堆) is the site of three early Han tombs in today's Furong District, by the Liuyang River east of Changsha's centre. Excavated between 1972 and 1974 after a hospital air-raid dig struck the first tomb, it held the chancellor Li Cang, his wife Xin Zhui — whose silk-wrapped body survived two thousand years — and a son buried with books, maps and medicine. The finds entered the Hunan Museum and made the site a byword for Han civilisation in the south. The tomb area joined the national key protected list in 2013.
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.