The Laolongwan Han Tombs Group is a cultural relic protection unit in Hebei Province.
Laolongwan, formerly known as Fulongyao, is located two kilometers north-southeast of Beishacheng, Wanquan County. On the north bank of the confluence of Dongyang River and Nanyang River near the village, there is a piece of land formed by river alluvial over the years. of flat land. Here are the key protected cultural relics of our province - Laolongwan Han Tombs. Also known as Beisha City Han Tombs Group. It is an extremely important cultural and historical site and a treasure house of cultural relics for studying where our Chinese ancestors lived, lived and multiplied.
These Han tombs are so tall (about six meters high and twenty meters in diameter) that they are very similar to the grain hoards used in ancient wars, so the locals have always called them "fake grain piles." It is said that in the past, there were nearly a hundred Han tombs like this on the north bank of the Yanghe River, starting from Yangmen Fort in the east and ending in Beisha City in the west. However, due to the vicissitudes of time and being affected by river erosion, erosion and man-made destruction, by 1940 only 13 remained. In 1982, when the Hebei Provincial Cultural Administration Office erected a monument and the tombs were officially listed as "provincial key cultural relics", there were only seven Han tombs here.
Although the Han tombs in Beisha City have been sleeping for more than a thousand years, due to the backward culture here, they have been little known for many years. In 1929, several tombs near the Yang River were washed away by water, revealing a copper basin and altar. Some people think it is a relic from Tan Daoji's expedition to the Northern Wei Dynasty in the Southern and Northern Dynasties; others think it is a burial object from the tombs of the Liao and Jin Dynasties. It was not until 1941, after the Japanese "East Asian Archaeological Society" conducted predatory excavation and research on the tomb, that people knew that it was a group of ancient tombs from the Han Dynasty.
The "Japanese Archaeological Team"'s excavation and research on the branch tombs in Beishacheng, our county, came about under a profound political background. At that time, Huai'an and Wanquan counties were merged into Wan'an County, which came under the jurisdiction of the puppet Mongolian government and was occupied by the Japanese army. Under the banner of "Greater East Asian Glory", the Japanese army not only plundered our county's material wealth, but also plundered our county's cultural wealth. In the spring of 1941, with funding from the puppet Mongolian government and under the auspices of the Japan Association for the Preservation of Stone Buddhas in Datong, a team from the Japan East Asian Archaeological Society personally worked on site and began the so-called "excavation" of the Han tombs in Beishacheng, our county. research". Japanese personnel participating in this excavation include members of the Japan Institute of East Asian Culture: Seiichi Mizuno, Toshio Nagasaki, Masao Kitano, Yi Hadate, Uichi Okazaki, etc. There are Ono Katsunori of the North China Transportation Co., Ltd. of the Japanese puppet company in Beijing; Tomohiro Kobayashi and Nontaro Inao of the Japanese and puppet government in Zhangjiakou City; Shoji Kanai, the top adviser to the Japanese and puppet Mongolian government; Keisuke Sasaki of the Stone Buddha Preservation Association; Wanan County Counselor Tsutomu Ueda also went to the site after the excavation of the ancient tomb began.
On September 25, the Japanese archaeological team came to Laolong Bay with enough necessary supplies. Personnel from all parties arrived one after another. The Japanese camp was set up in a new house owned by He's family in the center of Laolongwan Village, with Liu from Zhangjiakou as the cook. Before the excavation, the Japanese archaeological team conducted on-site survey and plan design of the ancient tombs. On September 29, the ground was officially broken for excavation.
The excavation of the ancient tombs was carried out on a platform about ten meters wide on the north bank of Yanghe River south of the Beijing-Baotou Railway. There are only thirteen pile-shaped ancient tombs exposed here. The distance between the tombs is four to five meters, and the tomb piles are generally in the shape of a square rhombus. Most of the only thirteen ancient tombs have been damaged due to years of wind erosion, rain, and water scraping. Only a few are still intact. The Japanese archaeological team selected three of the more complete ancient tombs No. 5, No. 6 and No. 7 for excavation. Okazaki was responsible for excavating Tomb No. 5, Inao Kobayashi was responsible for excavating Tomb No. 6, and Ono was responsible for excavating Tomb No. 7. From October 4th to October 7th, three ancient tombs were excavated one after another to obtain the tomb objects. Yi Hadate, Toshio Nagahiro, and Masao Kitano successively assisted in the excavation and surveying. It was not until the end of October that the excavation of the three ancient tombs and the inspection of unearthed cultural relics were completed. Before and after, it lasted thirty-eight days. On average, the Japanese forced about 30 local farmers, ranging from 50 to 10, to a total of 500 excavations every day. On the same day, Haguan Yi, a member of the Japanese archaeological team, took pictures of the scene. On November 1, Japan began to fill in the ancient tomb and restore it. Eighty migrant workers were used every day, and the backfilling was completed on November 3. At that time, it was the Meiji Festival in Japan, and the Japanese asked Taoist priests to perform a soil-receiving ceremony in front of the tomb to ensure that nothing would happen after the ancient tomb was excavated.
When the "Japanese archaeological team" excavated ancient tombs, they also unearthed a large number of precious historical relics on the tribal platform at the old site of Beisha City.
Among them are the bronze phoenix and turtle foot Boshan incense burner, the ring-eared copper tripod, the copper bowl, the dishwasher, the animal ring bronze 钫, the bird's beak awl, the steamer cauldron, the bronze grate; the flat pot with a lid, the copper plate, the lacquerware mirror, and the lighting. Heavy circle mirror, peak button nebula mirror, tomb town, pill bottom pot, shallow steamer bowl, cyan ear dang, and colored glaze products. There are also cord-patterned jade tiles, coarse grain-free gray pottery pots with ball bottoms, Huaner tile pots, iron knives, and iron shovel blades. There are also some abandoned wild vegetable and grain storage cellars from the Han Dynasty, used to store the remains of the deceased.
The ancient cultural relics unearthed from the old site of Beisha City include Wang Bowl, Deep Bowl, Gao Bei, and tiles with concentric garden patterns, etc.
In addition, historical relics of great value to the study of the cultural history of ancient human settlement and life during the primitive society period of our county were also found in the soil layers contained in the vertical caves of the Han tombs. Such as Neolithic red pottery shards, stone chips, axes, stone hammers, shell-made sharp tools and other cultural relics.
According to the records in the book "Wan'an Beisha City" compiled and published by the Japanese Archaeological Association in East Asia in 1941, it can be considered that the above-mentioned ancient cultural relics can be divided into three categories. The first category includes burial objects from Han tombs; the second category includes gray pottery relics from ancient city settlement sites; and the third category includes red pottery relics and stone tools from the Neolithic Age that were unearthed at the same time.
By analyzing the cultural and historical characteristics of these three types of cultural relics in different periods, we can infer the cultural and historical context of our county before the Han Dynasty. As early as the primitive society, on this ancient land on the north bank of the Yanshui River (now Yanghebei), there were already Han people with red pottery culture who migrated here from the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River and lived and worked in peace and contentment. The red pottery culture people at this time had just evolved from the painted pottery culture. Hundreds of years later, during the Qin and Han Dynasties, the Han people with red pottery culture gradually evolved into those with gray pottery culture, and their production technology and cultural level had become relatively developed. The descendants of these Han cultural people still lived, lived and multiplied here until the Niaohuan and Xianbei ethnic groups, which were in primitive society and mainly engaged in animal husbandry, attached themselves to the Han Dynasty and settled here. This place gradually became the territory and power of the two ethnic groups. After controlling the area, Han farmers retreated within the Great Wall. As a result, the once prosperous border area began to decline.
From the Neolithic painted pottery, stone, shell sharp tools and other relics found in the vertical caves of Han tombs, as well as the structure of vertical cave-style houses, we can know that the red pottery here Literary people have obvious characteristics of the late period of painted pottery culture. They have lived here for probably more than a thousand years.
The bronzes, irons, animal bones, gray pottery, five baht coins, wild vegetables, and grain storage cellars unearthed from Han tombs can also indicate that the owner of the tomb belongs to the gray pottery culture and lived in the Warring States, Qin and Han Dynasties. era, leading a settled life of craftsmanship and farming. They sow grain and raise livestock and poultry. The living style has also changed from the underground vertical cave type to the above-ground building residential type. Various utensils with different functions were found in Shengkuo. Such as utensils, plates, bowls, bean bowls, pots, urns and other gray pottery vessels; stoves, steamers and cauldrons; dressing utensils, lacquer mirrors, etc.; farming tools, iron tools such as shovels and knives. This shows that the gray pottery culture people at that time had entered the Iron Age. The pottery making industry has also been quite developed, and they have mastered and equipped a large number of pottery making techniques and kiln-firing equipment. Chinese character culture has been commonly used here. The currency exchange of commodities has appeared here, and the prototype of the primitive industrial and commercial economy has taken shape. These are enough to prove that during the Qin and Han Dynasties, these Han cultural people lived here for at least hundreds of years.
From the tomb objects and the construction form and scale of the tomb, it can also be seen that the tomb owner was related to the county government and had a high social status. The tomb owner wanted to make his life as comfortable and happy as before his death. The funeral was extremely extravagant. The wooden coffin and funerary objects were all carefully decorated and arranged according to the living habits during his lifetime. This shows that the custom of generous burials was prevalent at that time, and the feudal hierarchy and the politics of counties and counties in the Han Dynasty also penetrated.
In addition, it can be inferred that Li Daoyuan's "Shui Jing Zhu" is about the city site where the Yan people and the prime minister of Qin Cai Ze (haogangchengjun) lived during the Warring States Period, which is now discovered The former site of Beisha City is roughly consistent with historical records. This also proves that before the Han Dynasty, the cultural history here had never been interrupted.
The Japanese archaeological team’s excavation of the plundered animals from the ancient Han tombs in our county caused unprecedented disaster to the ancient cultural relics in our county, but in a sense, they caused these thousands of people to sleep underground. It is also of certain positive significance that the precious cultural relics of 2016 be brought to light as soon as possible and recorded in detail in books.
Not only can we understand the true appearance of these ancient tombs from the records in Japanese archaeological books, but we can also find cultural relics of ancient human settlement and development, from which we can feel the pulse of our Chinese ancestors' lives here. It is of great significance in broadening the horizons of future generations, looking forward to the future, and filling in the gaps in the history of our county. Although the whereabouts of most of the unearthed ancient cultural relics are unknown, we can still appreciate their cultural and artistic value from some photos of China in the book "Wan'an Beisha City" published by Japan.