"My machine just grabbed the ancient coffin, when I was excavating for road works," recalled 38-year-old Jiang Maodong, a digger driver, whose machine accidentally unearthed a coffin containing a 2,000-year-old body of a woman.
On the afternoon of July 7, Jiang was driving his digger at a highway project in Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province, east China when the discovery was made.
"Suddenly, my digger's claw touched something hard, but at first I thought it was a stone," said Jiang, beginning what could have been a horror story.
When the digger grabbed a big piece of wood Jiang knew he had broken open a coffin. "But I didn't think at that stage it was from a very old tomb," he said.
Then, the machine brought up the coffin and Jiang realized it might be from an ancient tomb and asked others to report to the police.
Police officers and local government officials from the city's cultural relics bureau stayed at the site over night to watch over the old tomb.
The next day, Zhou Jinping, director of the city's museum, came with his colleagues and conducted an official excavation in vicinity of the tomb.
In addition to the coffin unearthed by Jiang and later labeled coffin No. 3, there were three others, marked coffins No.1, No.2 and No. 4.
The experts left coffin No.3 to one side knowing it had been grabbed by the machine and might have been seriously damaged, though it appeared intact and sealed.
They searched the three others for archeological relics, and soon came to a conclusion that all the four coffins belong to the West Han Dynasty (206 BC-25 AD).
On the morning of July 9, staff at the museum began cleaning and checking coffin No.3 and were shocked when looking through an aperture to see a preserved foot floating in an unknown liquid.
It looked as though the Han Dynasty corpse in the coffin was completely preserved.
The Lianyungang museum is a small one, unprepared for such a big discovery. A local hospital was asked to bring formalin to the museum.
The ancient coffin was opened and the body was found to be floating in the unidentified liquid.
The staff made a temporary container made from steel pipes and plastic and filled it with formalin. They wrapped the ancient body with absorbent cotton and placed it in the "temporary coffin".
In the original coffin they found articles belonging to the ancient woman, a toilet set and a list of what had been placed in the coffin when the woman was buried.
"It is so lucky that the coffin remained intact when grabbed by the digger," said an expert from the museum. "Otherwise, the corpse might have been damaged and putrefied by the sun."
It is normal practice for archeologists to open the coffin and make on-the-spot examination at the place where it is found.
The body was kept in the temporary container for seven days and then moved into a specially designed glass container filled with formalin. Experts are continuing their examination.
According to latest information, the woman measures 1.58 m.
A bronze seal found in the coffin bears her family name, "Ling", and given name, "Huiping". In ancient China, only families with official background were allowed to own seals.
Reporter has taken a close look at the ancient corpse and found that the woman is slightly obese and has thin hair. Her left eye is half open and the eyeball slightly exposed. Her arms are on her stomach and her left lower leg is thinner than the right one.
According to the experts, Lianyungang, though a coastal city, used to be part of an ancient continent, where lots of ancient tombs have been found.
Lianyungang is an underdeveloped area in Jiangsu, compared with other parts of the industrialized province. Some people fear that the city does not have enough resources and expertise to conduct in-depth studies on the ancient body and to keep it in a state of preservation.
The museum has reported the finding to the provincial and central governments.
Xu Yongqing, a researcher from the institute of studies on preserving corpses in Shanghai, said the current immersion of the body in formalin would protect it for the time being.
The director of the museum said the measure is only temporary and final decisions have to be made by the upper authorities and authoritative experts on how to maintain the body's preservation in order to study the body for as long as possible.
(Xinhua News Agency July 24, 2002)
