One day in 2009, a construction team in Nanjing was working on the area of General Mountain, when a large number of tomb bricks were suddenly excavated. Since everyone was working in Nanjing, the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties, it was no surprise that the ancient tomb was dug, and they calmly contacted the relevant departments, and soon, the archaeologists arrived at the scene.
After preliminary investigation, the archaeological team deduced that this is a Ming Dynasty tomb, but unfortunately, this ancient tomb has been seriously damaged, and no valuable funerary items have been found in the coffin, so it has lost its archaeological value, and after discussion among experts, it was decided to bury it on the spot. In fact, this is a very common way of dealing with it.
However, heaven seems unwilling to let the tomb return to darkness, a staff member buried the tomb, suddenly found two epitaphs, the top 2 words attracted everyone's attention - "An Shi". I believe that when I saw these 2 words, everyone's first reaction was Wang Anshi, a famous politician and writer in the Song Dynasty.
In order to determine whether the tomb is related to Wang Anshi, experts have consulted the information while continuing to excavate the tomb. After the efforts of many people, the relevant record was finally found in the "History of Song": "At the age of forty-six... Mother Xie clan feng Yong'an County Jun... And I and An Shiyou, with An Shi's words and books, came to ask for inscriptions, so that they could be especially saddened. ”
It turned out that this was not a Ming tomb at all, but a Northern Song tomb, the owner of the tomb was Wang Anshi's father Wang Yi, and the person responsible for the inscription on the epitaph was Zeng Gong, one of the "Eight Greats of the Tang and Song Dynasties", so that this seemingly inconspicuous ancient tomb instantly became star-studded and full of value.
The spiritual head of the experts reached its peak instantly, they immediately re-excavated, and soon dug up several precious Pieces of Song Dynasty porcelain from the tomb, in the next few days, they found dozens of cultural relics, to a certain extent, filling the gap in history, which made all the staff present extremely excited, but at this time, an accident occurred...
Four people from Jiangxi province interrupted the team's work and demanded that they immediately stop digging. After communication, everyone understood that these 4 gentlemen were from Shangchi Village, Fuzhou City, Jiangxi Province, and were all descendants of Wang Anshi, one of whom was Wang Anshi's 36th generation Sun Wang New Year.
When they heard that Wang Anshi's father's tomb had been discovered in Nanjing, they were happy and anxious, happy to find the tomb of the old ancestor; anxious that the archaeological team was afraid that the archaeological team had dug up the tomb of the old ancestor, so they immediately sent Wang Xinnian and others as representatives to Nanjing to stop the behavior of the archaeological team. Although the staff can understand the mood of Wang Xinnian and others, the tomb is of great significance to the country and history. As a result, the two sides reached an impasse.
Wang Xinnian was worried that he would not be able to protect the graves of his ancestors, so he took the joint letters of hundreds of village names in Shangchi Village and ran to the Nanjing Cultural Relics Department to apply for a halt to the excavation work, and asked that the excavated cultural relics and remains be handed over to them so that they could be brought back to their hometown in Jiangxi for burial. In the end, the relevant departments agreed to the request of Wang Anshi's descendants, after all, as a descendant, it is understandable to want to properly take care of the bones and relics of the ancestors.
Today, the bones and relics of Wang Anshi's father have been buried in Shangchi Village for generations of worship and protection for generations of Wang's descendants.
Reference: History of the Song Dynasty