Daomu Biji: Wu Xie’s Private Notes

Sea burial was a type of burial method unique to the coastal peoples, but unlike the Vikings’ sea burials, the same land burial custom was performed when constructing ancient undersea tombs here. In fact, it was just burying ancient tombs on the bottom of the sea.

Throughout history, there were many people who used underwater ancient tombs for burial. The more famous ones were Concubine Chen’s Water Tomb in Jinxi and Shen Wansan’s Underwater Tomb in Yinzibang.

The one I was most interested in was actually Cao Cao's (1). He had seventy-two fake tombs, one of which was rumored to have been found in the Qinglu River in Xuchang.

There were a few legends, and the first two still had clues that could be followed, but you could only get clues to the second one from Pu Songling’s “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” (2). After reading it, I felt like there was some basis to it, because the content didn’t sound like something that people at the time could make up.

Cao Cao’s tomb in “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio”. The original text of "Cao Cao’s Tomb" is as follows:

Outside Xucheng, the river was turbulent, and the water near the cliff was deep and gloomy. In midsummer, someone entered the river to bathe and was suddenly cut by an axe; their broken corpse floated up from the water. The same thing happened to another person, which startled people.

Upon hearing this, the town governor sent people to cut off the upper flow of the river. Once the water was exhausted, they saw a deep hole under the cliff, where a wheel with blades as sharp as frost had been placed in the middle.

They removed the wheel and broke in. There was a small tablet inside the hole, with characters written in the style of Chinese seal script. Looking closely at the words, they found that it was the tomb of Cao Mengde. They broke open the coffin, scattered the bones, and took all the gold and treasures.

The writer’s notes said (3): “A poet once said that there would definitely be a real tomb among the seventy-two fake ones, but who knew that the real one wasn’t among the seventy-two graves at all? Cao Cao was really cunning! But after more than a thousand years, he still couldn’t keep his bones intact. What was the point of being cunning? Alas, Cao Cao’s wisdom was his own foolishness!”

The translated content was very legendary. The general meaning was that someone was swimming in the river by a cliff and suddenly seemed to be cut in half by a knife. The corpse emerged from the water, and the same thing happened to the next person.

They felt that there was something strange at the bottom of the river, so they stopped the flow of the water to check what was going on, and saw a deep hole in the lower part of the cliff that had been submerged by the water. There was a wheel full of blades at the entrance of the cave, and inside was Cao Cao’s tomb.

I had seen many strange mechanisms in ancient tombs, so I knew that it wasn’t difficult for ancient people to make something like this. The difficulty was finding the driving force that could rotate the wheel. This was probably the reason why this tomb had been built in the water.

In order to have a mechanism that could be used for a long time, a source of power that could operate continuously for thousands of years was essential. The river was the perfect source, but Wang Zanghai thought much further than that and utilized the ocean currents and tides at the bottom of the sea.

However, there were flaws in this legend. I highly doubted that the millennium-old blades were as sharp as ever, considering how the underwater environment was very unsuitable for metal preservation. Unless these parts were all made of gold, which wasn’t impossible.

Another flaw was that it was more reasonable to close the ancient tomb’s entrance by some means than to install a mechanism.

If the person hadn’t been hurt while bathing, then the ancient tomb wouldn’t have been discovered. Nevertheless, if you made a wheel that could hurt people, there would always be a day of accidental injuries, and someone would inevitably go down to see what happened. The skilled craftsmen who could make this kind of mechanism should have been able to think of this, so why would they make such a mistake?

I was afraid that there was another hidden story. The Central Plains had developed at the cost of soil erosion. The Qinglu River in Cao Cao's era should’ve had more water, so the ancient tombs should be deep underwater. By Pu Songling's era, the water level dropped a lot, which meant that the ancient tombs at the bottom of the river could be infiltrated with human power [Note: sic].

These floating corpses were probably grave robbers who tried to explore the tomb at that time, and were either killed by the mechanism or started killing each other for profit, which caused the tomb to be exposed.

To be honest, this information had given me a lot of inspiration. I had been thinking about how Wang Zanghai’s undersea tomb was built, because the human and material resources at that time made it almost impossible to utilize other methods in watery environments besides the shipwreck tomb. But this information did give me an idea.

It was possible that Wang Zanghai had built a dam in the seabed area to form a roundabout and then drained the seawater to roughly form a dry piece of land. After that, he dug a huge pit and released the water so they could sail the ship. He then pumped the seawater out again, let the tomb ship could slowly sink into the pit as the water level dropped, and then destroyed the dam to allow the seawater to return.

From the floor plan, the structure of this undersea tomb was very complicated. If they didn’t use this method, then they must have used calculus to figure out how to accurately sink the tomb to the bottom of the sea. But that was probably impossible. I couldn’t help but think, if the ancients could stop a river from flowing, why couldn't they build a roundabout on the seabed?

I went back and checked the textbook and found that there was a problem— ancient people didn’t know how to deal with water seepage.

The sand at the bottom of the sea was too permeable, and the manpower and material resources needed to build this kind of dam were several times more than that of the sunken ship.

When I asked an old professor who had taught me before, he thought about it carefully and said that the key should be the huge stone anchors. The stone anchors were distributed in a wide area of the sea, and must have served the same function as cable-tie structures. The countless stone anchors played a role in regulating the ship’s balance as it sank to the bottom of the sea.

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TN Note:

(1) Cao Cao, courtesy name Mengde, was a Chinese warlord, statesman, poet, and one of the central figures of the Three Kingdoms Period. Wiki link

(2) Refresher: “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” or “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio”, also called “Liaozhai Zhiyi” in Chinese, is a collection of Classical Chinese stories by Pu Songling, comprising close to five hundred "marvel tales".

(3) The writer here refers to Pu Songling, the author of “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio”. He sometimes added notes under the tale he recorded.