In the more than five thousand years of Chinese civilization, how many heroes and heroes have buried their bones in other places, and how many nameless pawns have been buried in the fields.
The traditional etiquette of ancient China admonishes people that burial is safe and the dead are large, which is different from today's "cremation", "water burial", "tower burial", "cliff burial" and other burial methods, so in people's cognitive vision, graves should be "everywhere".
But this is not the case, whether in today's urban areas or in the countryside, tombs exist in a very small proportion, why is this?
First, the historical origin
Chinese's understanding of burial began in the pre-Qin period of China, the excavation of the Yangshao culture Banpo site unveiled the source of the earliest burial in ancient China, 50,000 square meters of prehistoric sites, excavated 250 tombs, a huge group of tombs for the Chinese funerary industry to provide rich historical resources.
However, it is not difficult to find that the earliest tomb group contains a large number of precious funerary items in the group buried at present, with a wide variety of types and all of them are expensive objects, which is a rare treasure that is difficult to reach for the peddlers and pawns, so its status is initially judged to be the eminent in the dynasty.
The Dawenkou site, unearthed in the late 1950s, once again validated China's historical custom of "nobility and no burial".
The tomb group of the Dawenkou site is a total of 820,000 square meters, 189 tombs have been found, and there are not only valuable jewels, but also various prehistoric buildings in the burial items, among which the historians have studied the tombs of the patrilineal clan, and the people buried are the leaders and relatives of the patrilineal clan.
It is not difficult to understand that the people who could be buried in the pre-Qin period of China must be powerful people, which is far from today's concept of "everyone can be buried".
After talking about the "noble tombs" of the pre-Qin period, let's look at the tombs of the Han Dynasty, and the tombs of the commoner class have already appeared in the tombs of the Han Dynasty.
In 2012, near the Zhuhe River on National Highway 107 in Handan City, Hebei Province, a total of 93 tombs of civilians in the Western Han Dynasty were found, with fewer and more ordinary objects unearthed, usually for daily dishes and chopsticks and other utensils, and the burial method is also based on husband and wife burial, and archaeologists currently infer that it may be a "family" tomb group.
Although the Han Dynasty already had a group of tombs of the commoner class, the number was far from the population base of the ancient people.
It is not difficult to speculate that with the continuous improvement of the ritual system, the social status of the common people has been continuously depressed, the distribution of social resources has gradually decreased, and more and more land resources have been owned by the state.
In the use of land by officials, it is difficult to free up special tomb groups for civilian use, so there are fewer tombs in ancient China, and the vast majority are nobles.
Second, natural change
The prominent symbol of the burial is the tombstone, which is usually made of high-quality stones such as Han white jade and Shanxi black, which can be kept for a long time under the erosion of wind and rain without decay and discoloration.
In ancient times, tombstones were usually composed of wooden plaques or bamboo boards, erected in the field, the daily wind and rain, in the long run, they needed to be replaced from time to time, and after a long time of no one took care of them, the wooden signs would gradually disappear into the heavens and the earth with natural changes.
Natural change includes not only wind and rain erosion, but also natural disasters such as earthquakes, flash floods, and mudslides.
The ancient disaster prevention and mitigation system was far from today's, and the sense of geographical belonging could not be compared with today's modern society.
When people are busy running for food and clothing, the emergence of natural disasters often does not cause people to rebuild after disasters, but to take a long way to go away and make another living.
At this time, the graves destroyed by natural disasters are gone, there is no trace, and relatives and friends often only remember in their hearts when they remember, and no tombstones will be built to mourn.
Over time, the graves of civilians gradually disappeared with the change of natural features, and those who could be left in the historical years were "shiren" or "officials" who valued "etiquette".
The reverence for ancestors and respect for etiquette in ideological concepts can always maintain respect for the deceased under the erosion of natural features.
Third, humanistic factors
Graves not only need to be built, but also need to be well preserved, and they need to beware of the covetousness of "gold seekers". As we all know, the ancient Chinese government once set up a "tomb robbery agency", and its main responsibility was to go deep into the tomb to find treasure and bring it out.
For example, during the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cao Cao, a generation of tyrants, set up military positions such as Zhonglang General and Lieutenant Touching Jin, specifically responsible for excavating treasures in tombs to alleviate the problem of insufficient military salaries in the imperial court.
Similar to the gold lieutenant and other military positions for the tomb damage is great, usually the gold lieutenant under the tomb group are the noble tomb group, the gold lieutenant in the process of touching the gold to destroy the tomb structure, just to seek treasures, often lead to the tomb loss of use value after the blowing up of the situation, the existence of a small number of tombs caused serious damage.
Similarly, with the change and development of family history, more and more immediate and collateral relatives have passed away in the family, and many descendants of the family only know their names and do not see their people.
It is also very unrealistic to carry out a large-scale tomb sweeping work for a long time, so people with a certain family foundation will choose to build ancestral halls and engrave the names of deceased relatives and friends in them to show their mourning.
When ancestral halls appeared, the number of tombs was greatly reduced, and quiet ancestral halls became the first choice for more families in ancient China.
There are even ancestral halls built in well-off families to mourn the deceased ancestors, and the poor civilians can only work hard to live, and they are not qualified to cast graves.
Polarization is extremely pronounced, and it has once again caused many people who have died in history to be buried, but not many graves. In addition, there are reasons that cannot be ignored are war.
In war, there are often tens of thousands of casualty units, and such a large number of casualty units can not build graves for posterity to admire, often in order to prevent the occurrence of plague buried on the spot or burned on the spot, the resulting unnatural deaths will not build graves.
Even if the virtuous wives of the family wanted to build tombs for xianggong, in ancient times, families that lost their sons were often extremely poor, and there were no resources to match this.
4. Summary
The historical origins, natural changes and humanistic factors of ancient Chinese society have had a full impact on the number of ancient tombs, and the historical idea of "the dead are large" is not applicable to all classes, and when the commoner class is still busy for food and clothing, the tombs in the clan are no longer the object of its consideration.
Living in today's society, a variety of burial forms and different burial methods reflect the material richness and ethical integrity of today's society.
With the increasing scarcity of land resources, group cemeteries such as JinbaoShan have become the first choice of more and more working people, which can not only remember the deceased, but also have special personnel to take care of them, becoming the best choice for ethical and social harmony.