At dawn, you returned home, exhausted, dragging your weary body.
As soon as you pushed open the door, a damp, musty smell assailed you. The room was a mess, a real shambles: books, clothes, and empty bowls were piled haphazardly, you even had to be careful where you stepped. The only thing that retained an ounce of order was the thermos flask in a corner – the hot water you had poured before leaving still retained some of its warmth.
You poured some hot water, added cold water to it, stood in the old enamel basin, and took out that bar of medicinal soap you usually used only sparingly – a yellowish block, its corners already worn down.
Today, you were making an exception, because tomorrow you were returning to the site and, without knowing why, you had suddenly started to worry about your smell, even becoming strangely particular about cleanliness.
The medicinal soap, mixed with water, immediately released a familiar, acrid smell of sulfur, as well as an indefinable bitterness that, like a disinfectant, forcefully invaded your nostrils. While frowning and rubbing yourself, you felt that subtle sensation, a mixture of tingling and coolness, glide over your skin.
After washing, your skin was taut and rough, as if a protective layer had been removed, but this cleanliness was absolute.
It was the characteristic "cleanliness" of that era: a sensation of survival – raw, hard, but reassuring – hard-won from sweat and earth.
Barely had day begun to break when commotion spread through the camp. After several hours of driving by car with a few team members, you had just arrived on site and were preparing to go to the burial corridor cleaning site, when, from afar, you heard a hubbub of quarrels coming from the western boundary.
As you approached, you saw a group of local villagers massed behind the security cordon, visibly agitated. A few young men were jostling each other, their eyes flashing.
"You call this a relic site? All we know is that we used to grow beans here!"
"This year, the spring rains came early. We hadn't even had time to turn the soil when you said it had to be cordoned off – and you just cordoned it off like that, all of a sudden?"
The man in the lead, in his thirties, had his sleeves rolled up high, revealing tanned arms. He stood right at the front, his eyes fixed on the members of the archaeological team, as if waiting for someone to dare speak first.
Behind him, a few villagers of the same age chimed in, their gazes hostile.
"Not to mention that we won't be able to cultivate this year, even if we can next year, the land will be ruined!"
"What you're digging up there, can we eat it? Drink it?"
The situation was deadlocked for a moment. The temporary liaison for coordinating affairs – a young man named Feng – stepped forward and tried to explain in a conciliatory tone: "This is an urgent exploration order from above, it concerns historical vestiges. The perimeter is temporary, coordination will be set up later..."
An old man in the crowd suddenly started shouting, his voice trembling but full of spite: "You're nothing but a disguised grain requisition team! When you speak politely, you call it culture; when you speak plainly, it's theft!"
The atmosphere tensed further. You stood aside, observing coldly. These villagers were not all simple, honest peasants; in the eyes of these young men, there was not only anger, but also a kind of rebellious impulse.
Most had received no formal education, had never seen real artifacts. For them, this land was their livelihood – anyone who opposed it became their sworn enemy.
"You say there's a great figure buried here," the young leader suddenly stepped forward, staring at you all.
"I only ask one question: if you really dig up gold, will you give me a share?"
At these words, the crowd immediately started to heckle: "That's right! Why should it all go to you?"
The air suddenly became electric. Liaison officer Feng pursed his lips, smiling with a certain stiffness: "The excavations are fully recorded, a public announcement will be made later... If you have any objections, you can register at the town hall..."
"Register, what's the use of that?"
"Your office over there, how many people have come and gone? Who can possibly keep track?"
A few older villagers tried to hold back the young leader, but he wouldn't be restrained, becoming, on the contrary, more and more vehement: "We don't care who you are. Today, whoever is at the table is in charge, but no matter how solid the table is, underneath it's the earth. And the earth, it belongs to us!"
The team members began to worry. You felt that the situation was about to spiral out of control. Then, a middle-aged man, who had been standing back, spoke up.
He was modestly dressed, his status indefinable, but his voice was calm, filled with a certain strength: "Since this land has been demarcated, competent people will come to discuss compensation. If anyone dares to act now, they shouldn't be surprised to see their name in the report."
At these words, the young men did indeed calm down for a moment.
Someone muttered: "What do we have to fear from them? They're just showing off because they can read a few words."
But the crowd slowly began to disperse. A few old villagers led the young ones away, speaking to them in low voices. The unrest wasn't truly calmed, just temporarily suppressed.
You silently memorized the face of that young leader. He wasn't the fiercest, nor the most impulsive, but what lay hidden in his eyes, you knew well. Not discontent, but a concealed expectation – like a wolf observing its prey, waiting for the right moment to strike.
You turned on your heel and headed towards the entrance of the main burial chamber.
The burial corridor was not wide, barely allowing two or three people to walk abreast.
You were in the second group, behind you the technicians, in front of you the lighting team.
The passage was damp and stuffy, the sound of soles on the water-soaked blue stone slabs was sticky. The fragments of peeling paint on the walls vibrated slightly with each of your steps, like a swarm of dead-leaf butterflies about to take flight.
Behind you, the film crew hurried along, laboriously carrying a heavy camera, as if it were a piece of field artillery. Two batteries were attached to the machine, a coarse hemp cord wrapped around a metal plate to avoid magnetic interference, and the spotlight swayed on the lens.
The assistant cameraman carried spare lenses in one hand, and a bag of film canisters in the other. The head of the film crew was named Han.
In his thirties, slightly round-shouldered, his hands calloused from carrying equipment. You remember that at the entrance of the tomb, while changing film, he had gotten tangled up and had almost reloaded an already exposed film.
His gaze was shifty, but it was clear that it wasn't out of fear, but because he knew too well what to film and what not to ask.
He said in a low voice to Jingwei: "This reel will only last two minutes and a bit. If the coffin isn't open by then, we'll have to change. We have four reels in total." His throat was dry and hoarse. "The studio didn't give us any new ones, these are still from the newsreel stock."
"We'll film what we can," Jingwei replied without turning around. "The discovery footage must be archived. Just don't film me, that's all."
"Hey... you're walking too fast, we can't keep up."
"Later, after opening the stone door, if there are frescoes, this batch of frescoes might not be salvageable," said old Zhao, who was walking beside you, in a low voice.
He had a degree in artifact restoration, his tone seemed calm, but you saw his fingers nervously clenching his camera case.
"Isn't there a way to treat them to humidify them first?" you asked in a low voice.
"You see things simply," sneered a young man carrying equipment in front, without even turning around.
"Behind this door is the main chamber. It's been closed for too long, the pressure difference is too great. Outside it's damp, inside it's dry. As soon as we open it, it'll be a shock, even a membrane won't hold. And if it's under vacuum, how do we get in?"
"Even if we sealed it now, we wouldn't have the means to control the temperature," Jingwei interjected from the front of the line, turning around. "This isn't a museum. Here, it's packed earth, even the air is loaded with alkali. The infiltrating water, as it evaporates, leaves salt. If we put a membrane, it'll stick everything together prematurely."
"So we can at least make recordings in segments, or..." Old Zhao's voice betrayed his fatigue. "Let's finish this work quickly and leave quickly. The report has been requested three times. A tomb like this, at first glance, won't yield any high-value artifacts. And besides, those at the top, they don't look at how you protect, only how many photos you've taken, how many numbers you've listed, how many lines you've written."
You said no more. You knew he was telling the truth. Post-disaster archaeological projects were advancing at a frantic pace, too many people were waiting behind the schedule. More importantly, public opinion weighed heavily, documents weighed heavily.
Officially, they spoke of "rescue excavations," but what was truly pressing was never the survival of the vestiges, but the signatures on the calendar.
At that moment, Jingwei retraced her steps, brushed your shoulder, and said to you in a very low voice, with a hint of mockery: "Those few days in town poring over your books, did you find anything interesting?"
"What do you mean?"
"Curiosity. I'm a scientist, history and all that, it's not my strong suit."
You turned your head and said in a low voice: "The epitaph mentions Princess Zhaohui, Lanyi, but no matter how much I consult official histories, alternative chronicles, and even private archives, her name appears nowhere."
Jingwei frowned: "How is that possible? A princess, the ancients wouldn't have recorded her?"
You nodded: "Perhaps it's because she was a girl. But it's also very strange, it seems as if the chroniclers also had something unspeakable to hide. I even suspect that if this tomb was able to be preserved, it's an accident in itself."
Jingwei was about to ask another question when, from the front, came old Zhao's shout: "The door is going to open! Step back two paces!"
At the end of the corridor, two members of the film crew together lifted the second camera, temporarily fixing it on an old tripod. The assistant cameraman, crouching behind you to the left, was filming your back, adjusting the lens focus through a red cloth bag.
Old Zhao's crowbar engaged in the crack of the stone door with a teeth-grinding screech. Six workers were massed in front of the door, shouting in unison. The coarse hemp ropes cut into their shoulders, making veins bulge and tearing the skin.
The door hinge slowly turned.
Brick dust cascaded from above, and a beam of light illuminated the particle-laden air. A pungent odor, a mixture of minerals, decomposing fabrics, and the dust of ages, violently struck your face.
You covered your mouth and nose and followed the lighting team into the burial chamber. The chamber's structure was surprising: a rare octagonal shape. In the four corners were piled several rusty bronze floor lamps, their cups filled with a thick layer of congealed grease, where one could still make out the once-lit carbonized wicks.
You cautiously entered the chamber. The wall frescoes, under the lamplight, revealed their splendor for a final moment.
The gold threads blackened before your eyes, the cinnabar degraded into dull brown spots, the stone blue turned to ash and flaked off. Before your eyes, the face of a court lady, like a soaked ink painting, dissolved, faded, line after line, barely giving you time to glimpse her last look back.
A few moments later, the entire wall was nothing more than a diaphanous shadow, like a ghost clinging to the stone.
Old Zhao crouched down, took a pinch of silver powder between his fingers, and murmured: "It dies on contact with air... The oxidation is far too rapid."
He wanted to add something, but stopped abruptly. The flashlight beam swept the inside of the stone door, revealing a series of dense, tight marks. These irregular scratches resembled nail marks, of varying depth, discontinuous, but all oriented in the same direction – outwards.
As you approached a few steps, you understood that it was neither erosion, nor tool marks, but human fingerprints. Embedded in the cracks, dried blood of a dark red. The flashlight continued downwards.
You almost crushed a bone.
Old Zhao pulled you back with one hand. You took a step back under his pull and, looking more closely, you saw a skeleton, face up, half-buried in the sand and earth at the foot of the wall. It wore sumptuous, already decaying clothes, but one could still vaguely distinguish on its shoulders embroideries of xiezhi in gold thread. Between its ribs was stuck a short sword, the hilt covered in silver, now oxidized and dark, but you recognized at first glance the ring-pommel inlaid with jade – it was a scholar's knife, used for books.
Your throat tight, you crouched down and carefully cleared the jade belt that remained around its waist: it was a gold fish-shaped plaque. Could it be Zhang Huaiqian?
Your mind buzzed, your hand trembled unconsciously, but you managed to stabilize the camera and, with a click, you took a photo. The focus assist lamp lit up then went out, a brief flash in the darkness.
The atmospheric environment changed abruptly. Textiles, under these conditions, oxidized even faster than if they were burning. In a short time, the clothes on the skeleton lost all color. A team member quickly arrived from behind and, with gloved hands, carefully and methodically arranged the funerary objects around the body.
The textiles were practically irretrievable, they turned to dust at the slightest touch. Bronze ornaments, jade rings, fragments of shoe tips, identification plaques, ivory seals.
He numbered each object and placed them successively in several dated transparent bags. You stepped back, positioning yourself in an unlit corner, your chest heavy. No one spoke.
You silently stepped over this skeleton lying beneath the wall fresco. At the end of the burial corridor was a chamber whose style differed completely from other royal main chambers. No high corridor entrance tower, no stone balustrades with guardian animals, even the usual inscriptions and divine statues were gone. The entire space was empty, silent, like a "forbidden zone" from which all sounds and symbolic meaning had been artificially erased.
And in its center, placed solitarily, was a stone sarcophagus. It was not as wide and massive as usual princely coffins, rather resembling a kind of scaled-down, compressed model of a building. Carved from a single block of stone, it featured eaves and colonnades at the front and back, with dougong (bracket sets) patterns discreetly engraved at the corners.
Its shape was strange, its style not corresponding to any funeral rite described in existing documents.
Someone murmured: "Palace imitation... but the proportions are not right."
You approached a few steps. The light struck the sarcophagus lid, whose sharply angled roof narrowed upwards like a ridge. On the highest stone surface were inlaid seven star-shaped metal plates – on closer inspection, each had a slightly irregular shape, the edges a bit rusty, but their reflection was extremely calm, not shining with a milky white like ordinary metals, but with a cold, bluish sheen.
"It's meteoric iron," you heard Jingwei's voice behind you, so faint it was barely audible. "Ancient forging techniques couldn't achieve such purity... It's true, it comes from the sky."
You looked at these seven stars, arranged like the Big Dipper. The distance between each star seemed to have been precisely calculated, corresponding exactly to the angles of astronomical charts. When the light beam swept over them, they shone with an indescribable texture, resembling neither iron, nor silver, nor any material you had ever seen on an artifact.
You suddenly thought of a phrase: "The deceased returns to hide in their place, their soul ascends to the Big Dipper."
As you approached this strange stone sarcophagus, the air suddenly seemed to freeze. The team instinctively formed a semicircle. Some people set up a makeshift tripod for the camera, while others began to arrange the lighting.
The lid of the stone sarcophagus was slowly lifted.
With a "crack," it shifted slightly. The next moment, everyone held their breath. It was not empty. The first layer was a thick accumulation of funerary objects: gold hairpins, silver belts, waist ornaments inlaid with precious stones, barbarian-style glass cups, red jade pendants and rings, as well as several crystal vessels of extreme transparency, which reflected the lamplight, diffusing a cold, ghostly glow. The slight clinking of metals striking each other was clear and shrill, as if awakening something.
"...This is royal level, isn't it?" a young team member asked in a low voice.
"Off the charts," you replied, already crouching to take photos, your voice vibrating with uncontrollable excitement.
"This pile, each piece taken individually, is a first-rate national treasure."
When the inner nanmu wood coffin was exposed to the light, the air seemed even colder. Everyone held their breath.
The lid of the nanmu coffin was delicately removed. At that moment, you even heard the sound of your own heart beating. It was not a body. But a dense, tight mass of documents and scrolls, a veritable tomb of books filling the entire inner space of the coffin.
Most were rolled into bundles, tied with thin silk ribbons on which one could still distinguish numbers and vermilion seals; a few were thin folded sheets, directly inserted into grooves in the inner nanmu wall.
A few thicker volumes were piled at the foot of the coffin, wrapped in thick oilcloth, with seals and clay stamps.
The operator slowly raised the camera. The camera motor hummed, and the film began to roll with a "da-da-da."
"So... where is the princess?" Jingwei's voice echoed for a long time in the burial chamber.