March 9, 2019 • 42 mins
Chinese aristocracy of the Western Han Dynasty embarked on their journey into the afterlife within garments of stone -- luxurious suits of jade armor entailing thousands of individual plates sewn together with gold, silver or silk. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Christian Sager explore this ancient funeral custom and both the scientific and superstitious qualities of jade. (Originally published May 9, 2017)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
it is Saturday. Time to go into the vault for
a classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I
think this is one that you and Christian did back
in right, Yeah, this one is about jade immortality, basically
about the the use of jade and beliefs about jade
(00:27):
from from Chinese history, particularly how it factors into the
jade armor that was used in some of these burial practices.
I believe we touched on this a little bit in
uh a later episode that you and I did, oh,
the one about the tomb of Chin Chi Huang. Yeah,
we at least touched on it as as part of
the history of of Chinese funeral traditions. Well, we hope
(00:49):
you enjoyed this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager.
(01:11):
We have kind of like a unofficial series of episodes
that we've been doing over the course of the last
two years that are related to various Asian cultures and death,
and this is another one of those. So we've talked
about ghost burial before, we've talked about Chinese immortality. Uh.
(01:32):
And then this is also slightly connected to the episode
that we did on or maybe it was two episodes
on mummification. Yeah, I feel like we've done two, maybe more.
I know that we've talked about exploring more and more
of the mummification cultures throughout the world. I know what
it is. We we discussed Japanese custom in an episode. Yeah. Oh,
(01:53):
and then there's also the monks. They have the self
mummifying monks. Yes, those guys. That's the other one. So
this is a long those lines. Today we're gonna be
talking about jade burial suits. And once I got done
researching this, my first thought was this would be a
far cooler way to make a new Mummy franchise. They've
(02:13):
been showing the trailers constantly for that New Mummy movie
with Tom Cruise that's coming out this summer, and it
looks awful, and I think that this would be a
cool mummy like this mummy in this giant suit of
jade armor coming at you. That would be so much fun. Yeah,
because you look at the images of this, and there
should be an image of one of these suits of
jade burial armor on the landing page for this episode.
(02:36):
It's stuffitable your mind dot com. It's uh, it looks
kind of like the villain in that first Thor movie,
you know, that big suit of animate armor that he
fought destroyer. Yeah, it looks kind of like the Destroyer.
It's it's beautiful, and indeed, I could see an Eastern
Mummy franchise really having some fun with this. Yeah. That
being said, I did not see the Eastern Mummy entrigue
(02:59):
like like the third or fourth Mummy film that came out.
Oh did they do something like that or did Oh?
I didn't know. I don't know what I having not
seen it, I can't speak for the mummy design. However,
I know there's a scene where yet he's attacks, so
I do kind of want to watch it for that, Huh.
I had no idea that even existed. This is like
from the nineteen nineties Mummy franchise with a Scorpion King
and all that. Yeah, this one was post Scorpion King
(03:22):
and that's about all I know about. Okay, Well, maybe
we'll talk about that one on trailer Talk when we
do a Facebook live about these episodes this week. So
in this episode, we're going we're going to be exploring
a practice that that is tied directly to the Western
Han dynasty, and we're gonna, I know a lot of
you out there are not going to have a real
(03:43):
firm handle on dynastic Chinese history. Don't worry. We're going
to root all that where it needs to be placed
in the in the timeline shortly. But these suits are
you know, we can call them jade suits, we can
call them jade armor. In the in manned in they're
sometimes referred to as you shaw, which are jade caskets,
(04:04):
or sometimes u y which are jade garments. And it
is essentially a stone garment if you think about that,
because because jade is a stone, and that's probably a
great place to start. Really, let's just discuss what jade
is before we pile on it's supernatural connotations and then
get into Chinese history. Alright, So jade is essentially an
(04:29):
ornamental green rock. Everyone has probably seen something that he's
either made of jade or is supposed to be made
of jade. But then what does that even mean, Yeah,
I'm thinking of like in the local mall that we
have here, there's like a couple like places where you
can buy sort of like Chinese themed aesthetic decorations for
(04:52):
the home, and usually there's like a piece of jade
in it somewhere, or it might be made of some
kind of fake jade. There's those um I forget what
they're called, but they have they're like red uh ribbons
or um threads and they've got a piece of jade
woven into them. Oh yeah. You often see little little
rings of jade, sometimes sometimes worn by by children in
(05:15):
China still or incorporated into some sort of direct decoration
or or personal adornment. And uh. The interesting thing here though,
is that whatever you're calling jade jade is the name
given to two distinct minerals uh neph right and jaded,
and in their purest form, either of these is white
(05:38):
uh in. In Chinese, it's referred to as mutton fat jade.
And you also have minerals such as iron and chromium
that give jade it's mini hughes. So there's not just
one color of jade. It's not like a crayola. This
is jade. Pulled it up to your stone and see
if it matches between white and like very green, yeah,
very in darker greens. Yeah. So let's talk about these
(05:59):
two varieties real quick. Uh. The nef right is sometimes
referred to as true jade. It's very strong, it has
a more vivid green coloration. And this is the stuff
that the Chinese worked with during the Han dynasty, which
is what we're gonna be talking about today, because jadeit
wasn't introduced to China until the late sixteen hundreds via Burma.
(06:20):
So when we're talking about these pieces of jade armor,
they're made using nef right, not jadeite. Now. Jadeite, on
the other hand, is more fragile, and it has a
brilliant gleaming surface when polished. Now jade is usually found
inside pebbles or boulders, where like the rough stony exterior
doesn't really give a clue as to what's in there.
(06:42):
Jade itself, it can't be chipped or flaked, so it
has to be worn down using a rough paste and
a combination of rotary discs, grinders, and tools. And during
the Han dynasty this was probably made. This paste was
made with water grease, and sand and then iron tools
had been developed specifically for the art and craft of
(07:05):
working with jade to develop and work it further into
various forms. Um So, I think this is a good
point for me to just bring up, Like I think
here in the West, Jade is sort of this very
like stereotypical attached idea to uh like the orient right,
(07:26):
It's very bound up in orientalism. Yeah. Like, do you
remember that video game came out gosh, must have been
ten fifteen years ago now, Jade Empire. I played the
hell out of that game. Oh was this that was
just a term based RPG. Yeah, it was made by
the same people who made the Knights of the Old
Republic games and the Dragon Age games. Very similar setup
(07:47):
except for this was in It had a really cool setting.
But it was like a steampunk mythological China um and
you know, as such used very like kind of stereotypical
pieces from that mythology. But still, I mean, I have
to admit, as much as I love exploring uh Asian history,
(08:07):
I also love fantasy inspired by Asian So yeah, uh
so I should I should check it out a little bit.
I don't know. It's one of those where the graphics
don't really hold up. I mean, I haven't played it
in so long. I think it was I played it
on the original Xbox. But it was fun. You got
like this various group of characters. You would have I
think like three characters at a time that would go
on these like sort of dungeon crawl missions and like
(08:29):
one would be a spell It was very D and
D but it was like we've talked about this on
the show before, the sort of like racist Oriental Adventures
D and D where they would like, you know, you'd
have a spell caster, you'd have a warrior, and you'd
have like a ninja or something like that, and they
would like go there. It was really just like a
fighter rogue and a magic user um and yeah, they'd
have these various missions. They'd fight monsters from Chinese mythology. Yeah,
(08:54):
it was fun aesthetically. So there was probably a little
jade in there, and oh yeah, yeah, I think that
the jade was a big theme in it. Yeah, well,
jade is is a big theme in uh in Chinese traditions,
So we should probably discuss what it's supernatural powers were
thought to be. We've we've given a brief overview of
(09:16):
its physical properties. Certainly you can go in deeper if
you want to. We're not really a minerals podcast, but
there's a lot of great information out there about jade
if that's your thing. As as far as supernatural qualities go, yeah,
jade was believed to have protective and preservative qualities, warding
off both decay and evil spirits. I've also read that
(09:38):
some believe jade darkens as the where gets richer, likenses
ticket poorer. So it's kind of like a mood ring
for your you know, your your financial status. That's great.
Instead of having like an app on your phone that
tells you how your bank accounts doing, you just have
like a little piece of jade, like like on one
of those red wristbands. Yeah, you meet somebody, you want
(09:59):
to know where they stand, you just take a peek
of their jade. Now. It's also worth pointing out that
in terms of just how important jade is in Chinese
tradition and mythology, you have u d the Jade Emperor,
and he stands as the supreme god in the Chinese
mythological pantheon. And if you if you actually think back
(10:20):
to the episode on the Chinese zodiac that stuff to
blow your mind did a while back. Uh, there's this
whole parable of the swimming zodiac animals in a race,
and they're racing for U D. Have you seen any
of those who movies about Dr D. I haven't. I'm
familiar with him by name, but I haven't watched their
fun You should check him out now. It's also important
(10:42):
to note that Dallas alchemists as well put put an
emphasis on jade as part of an immortality elixir that
also contained gold, silver, arsenic, and other ores, and it
was said to provide resistance to aging and decay. In fact,
in the three twenty book Po Po which means the
(11:03):
Master Embracing Simplicity, author Gee Hong wrote that gold and
jade inserted into the nine orifices prevented corpses from decaying. Okay,
so this comes up a lot today when we're talking
about this jade burial armor. And I wanna establish something here.
So I read this and I went, I had to
(11:24):
count my orifices, and I was like, I kept coming
up short. I only counted seven, and then I realized
they were counting the eyes. Yes, And it might sound
kind of grotesque. To think of eye plugs, but they're
not like corks the ice, more like their little shields.
It's kind of like when cucumbers on the eye. Yeah,
the one I was going for was how they would
(11:46):
put coins on people's eyes that they could pay the
ferryman for the river Sharon. But yeah, this is obviously
different mythology, but it's the same principle. It's like little
jade shields that went over your eyes. So apparently I
don't know if I'm wrong or right, but I never
thought of my eyes as being orifice. Is well, it's
it's where the light comes in, right, true, something's going
(12:08):
in there now. It's interesting I mentioned children wearing jade
bengals earlier and you you still see this used in China.
And this is the idea here is that this protects
the child from harm, including soul separating fright by a demon.
And uh, I actually ran across the cool source for this.
So if we if we ever want to do an
(12:29):
episode on Chinese exorcism, uh, playing off our past episodes
on exorcism, this would be a good one to seek out.
I think that's hard, yes from me, but audience, let
us know if you're interested in Chinese exorcism. Now in
terms of other associations, some traditional Chinese medicine approaches call
for the use of jade massaging tools to help I
(12:50):
was reading about using it on wrinkles on the face.
And they are also ingredients with jade in the name
in Chinese traditional medicine. They're not shy jade, such as
a jade windscreen powder that's just a dried root of
of a particular plant, but it has nothing to do
with the mineral itself. So even though like we're well
past this sort of you know, myth that jade has
(13:14):
this ability to stave off the k it's still used
in a lot of those sort of I guess homeopathic methodologies.
Like I was reading about the one of the ones, uh,
the ancient Chinese jade stone being used, like I think
they would like wrap it around your neck and it
was supposed to help you with T M J H. Yeah,
I mean it's I mean ultimately comes down to the
(13:36):
idea that here is this very beautiful, cool looking stone
that came out of the ground. Surely it's worth keeping
around for something, right. Yeah, it reminds me of hematite.
There's there's similar stuff surrounding hematite. Yeah, but just I
think in different cultures, and you know a lot of
this bleeds into into other cultures outside of China. I know,
if you if you happen to visit a Korean sauna,
(13:57):
and we have one of these in the Atlanta Era
and j June um and and I love going there.
They have these various saunas that sauna rooms that have
different minerals there, and they have one that has jade
in it. And the idea here is that quote jade
increases metabolism, improve circulation, and relieves arthritis pain. All right, now,
this is giving me an idea for a business, and
(14:19):
I'm not very entrepreneurial, so maybe somebody out there can
start this. So you combine the jade sauna idea with
the floatation sensory deprivation tank, and you build a sensory
deprivation tank out of jade, and then you climb inside
that and you float in salinated water for an hour.
(14:39):
That would be amazing because that's what that's something that's
kind of lacking with with float tank scenarios is they
are very they're very secular. Yeah, they could use a
little um mystical spicing. Yeah, yeah, that would be fun.
I'd do it. Yeah, plug plug our orifices with us,
give me nine pieces of jade. All right, Well, before
(15:02):
we get those nine pieces of jade, why don't we
take a quick break, and when we get back, we're
gonna give you a little bit of a rundown on
the Western Han dynasty. Alright, we're back. So I realized
Chinese dynastics secession can be confusing for folks. Uh and
and certainly especially if you're just going from zero trying
(15:24):
to go to from zero to fifty on it. It's
it's a lot to take. I will admit. I mean,
as some listeners know, I spent time in China as
a kid. I learned Mandarin growing up, and I lived
in Singapore during high school, and Chinese history is completely
lost on me. It's really tough for me to keep
track of it. Yeah, I I'm constantly referring back to
(15:45):
the chart with the with the dynasty's. Now. I know
there's a little song I've heard people sing this where
it's Fred Fred Jacka, except it's it's the different dynasties.
I have not heard that, Okay, I when I say
I've heard it, I've I've seen a video with two
old white Chinese scholars singing it to each other as
(16:05):
an example of something you learn in school when you're
learning about Chinese sisters. All right, so it's like a
new modic device. Yeah, okay, so we're not gonna throw
it all at you. Basically, we're gonna go from the
beginning up until the Han dynasty just and throughout the years,
so you can place it in the general time frame.
And uh, the Han dynasty is essentially the fourth or
(16:26):
fifth dynasty or the second Imperial Dynasty. It ultimately depends
on what you count as a dynasty. Uh. And and
this has to do with sort of a legendary mythic time.
So let's start from the beginning. First, up, you have
the Shod dynasty. This is to six b C. And
it's largely mythological, with some very early Bronze Age evidence.
(16:51):
So yeah, this is the time of gods and heroes
and so. And this is why some don't actually count
this in terms of historical dynasties. But then comes the
Shan dynasty, and this was long considered apocryphal, but his
historians now correlated with oracle Bone writings. This period takes
us up to roughly even twenty three b C. And
(17:14):
the Joe dynasty. Now this is the first millennium BC,
and this is a time of conflict in China. And
there are two periods here that are a particular note,
and that's the Spring and Autumn from seven eighty one
b C and the Warring States period four through to
b C. Okay, So what I'm seeing here so far
is it seems like these dynasties lasts you know, roughly
(17:36):
around five years. Yeah, yeah, so so far. Now, at
the end of the Warring States period, the Chin Dynasty begins,
and this is when the Chin Kingdom conquered other central
Chinese states and became the first truly imperial dynasty under
Chin cha Hung, the first Emperor of China. And it
(17:58):
was during this rule that the Northern Border Wall was implemented,
what we now call the Great Wall, and in the
first of many peasant uprisings to to echo through Chinese history,
Lubang rose up and conquered China to found finally the
Han dynasty and two oh six b c E. And
this was only you know, fifteen years later, Okay. So
(18:20):
this this is where we're zoning in on in terms
of this jade burial armor being created, right, But there's
obviously many dynasties afterwards. So yeah, the Han dynasty is
is big money early on like this is uh, this
is again a time of things coming together, of unity.
Certainly there's still lots of lingering problems as with any
imperial scenario, but but it's it's a time where, uh,
(18:44):
where there's a there's enough there are enough riches out there,
there's enough specialization that you can have something like a
fancy funeral tradition take place. Now, overall, the Han dynasty
run ran from two o two or two oh six
b C until two one CE, so you were talking
about a pretty long stretch here, uh, and that at
(19:06):
the end of this in to C that's when everything
splits into the three kingdoms. But we divided the Han
dynasty up into the first the former or Western Han dynasty,
and the and also the later or Eastern Han dynasty.
And that's because in the midst of this uh, this
long you know, four century stretch, you have a rebellion
(19:27):
take place, and so and basically what happens is Han
dynasty official Wang Mang sees his power and UH and
and this is referred to as the Shin dynasty nine
through D. He does a pretty poor job. And then
the hans A reclaimed power in twenty a d after
besieging the Imperial Palace. He dies in the process. So
(19:50):
in other words, you have to four hundred years of
of Han rule. But there's this one little period where
a usurper, like a twenty period or actually less than
twenty years of this one guy ruling and they just
getting taken down. So again, this is an influential four
centuries in Chinese history saw the institution of Confucian norms,
(20:12):
the roots of the imperial examination system, UH, the an
age of great economic, technological, cultural, and social progress. Hans
still refers to the main Chinese ethnic group. And this
is again also the period that gives us these these
amazing jade burial suits. Okay, so we've teased enough. What's
a jade burial suit? Because I think when I first
(20:34):
heard about this, my thought was that it was like
Iron Man, and it was, but iron Man made of jade,
and that's not correct. There's thousands of little pieces and
these things. Yeah, it's between two thousand and four thousand
of these little jade pieces, all of its sewn together,
and it's sewn together depending on your station, it might
be gold, silver, or silk. So really the suit described
(21:00):
option is probably better. This is a a suit made
for a corpse, and it's a suit made of maybe
you know, mostly stone, and maybe gold and silver or
silk as well. I can't imagine that a living person
could wear one of these and and move. It would
be incredibly heavy. Yeah, only a supernatural um, you know,
(21:20):
undead being in Hollywood movie could do it. Now, we
referred back to our episode on ghost burial earlier, and
and I do want to touch on on that real
quick because one of a couple of the ideas we
discussed in there are central to understanding why this much
care was was taken, uh, you know for a dead individual.
So we we discussed the importance of siao the filial
(21:46):
pity and Chinese tradition is rooted in Dallas to philosophy
Confucian family values, and it concerns the undying nature of
the human soul. You know, the dead live on in
the afterlife. Uh. And then they're also tied to this
Chinese no of of of structural completeness, right, that you
have this this basic unity of the family and if everything,
(22:06):
if anything, is out of out of place there, it's
going to cause disharmony in your life and potentially in
the afterlife. Yeah, we went into far greater detail on
this in the Ghost Burial episode, but I wanted to
reference a USA Today article that was specifically about the
jade burial suits and how it referred to this to
for Western readers. So it claims that tombs in general
(22:30):
were thought to be portals between the living and the dead.
And basically the concept was, and this is similar to
what we went over in Ghost Burial, the soul was divided.
There's one part of the soul that goes to heaven,
the other part stays in the body, and the one
that's in the body had to be appeased or else
it would turn evil, while the one that goes to
heaven acted on behalf of the loved ones by offering
(22:51):
them either protection or good fortune. And this is why
the living tried to ensure that the deceased were well
provided for in death. So you get very similar death
rituals to the Egyptians in that like people are buried
with their things, with things that they think will keep
them comfortable. Yeah, there's this this this mix though with
(23:12):
the the ancestor of veneration that it's not only is
this somebody that deserved a proper burial and deserves to
be you know, buried and with the things that they loved.
This is also someone who can speak on your behalf
in the afterlife, Like, this is an important contact to have.
So you want them to be happy, You want to
do right by them. So the very first one of
(23:33):
these suits, which is part of that, was documented in
literature around a d three twenty. But that's documented in literature.
We didn't find them until far afterward. Yeah, it wasn't
until nineteen fifty eight that the suit hypothesis here that
that these little jade pieces we were we were finding
were part of the jade suit. You know, it was
(23:55):
just a theory at the time. And uh, it wasn't
until we actually found a really undisturbed tomb nine in nine,
two tombs and heavy and this is where we found
tombs undisturbed by looters or mining efforts, and it resulted
in two complete, recovered and restored suits of jade armor.
And this is quite a story. And if you've you know, well,
(24:17):
we're going to talk about this, but museums here in
the United States have had these suits one or the
other brought around on tour basically, right, And so it's
possible that you've actually seen one of these sort of
restructured and put on display in a museum here in
the West. But uh, that's weird to me. I'll talk
(24:38):
about it more later after we get through it, but
I think it's a little it's it seems slightly offensive
to me, especially given the nature of why it was
built in the first place. Now you mentioned restored, and
that's key because if you see one of these new
museum on display, it is almost assuredly been restored because
despite the ideas tied up with jade, jade doesn't or
(24:58):
at least the jade suit is it was executed, does
not actually preserve the body. So the body ends up
rotting away, there's nothing left but bone. The suit collapses,
and then sometimes the casket collapses as well on top
of it, so everything has to be put back together.
Now you actually have seen one, right, Uh, yeah, I
think I've seen a couple, but the one that I
(25:19):
got to see in China is the one that impressed
me the most. It was at the Museum of the
Western Han Dynasty, Mausoleum of the Nanyu King and Guang Show.
So I was there with my wife, my my my
newly acquired son. He was not impressed at all as
I strolled him around in the stroke how old was he?
(25:39):
Though he was like two or three, he was like
he was one and a half. He was not having
any of it. But but the tomb was. It was
really impressive for me anyway. Uh. It was a hidden
twenty meters sixty five point six ft underground and the
king himself was covered with with a with a silk
(25:59):
and two thousand two pieces of jade to compose his suit.
And the whole tomb really had the feel of just
a cosmic vessel, and that this was the suit of
a of a necronot, you know. Uh yeah, but very
much in keeping with with the feeling that I get
from from any kind of Egyptian artifacts. Now a number
of other such jade suits accompanied by hordes of silks,
(26:22):
lacquer ware, figurines, and bronzes. You'll find these displayed in
many Chinese museums. H they turn up as you pointed out,
in an international Collections and Traveling Exhibits and three count
from the Institute of Archaeology and Beijing claimed ten thousand
Han tombs had been discovered, and this resulted in twenty
tombs with twenty three jade suit remain. All right, we're
(26:46):
gonna take a quick break and then when we come back,
we'll jump right back into it. All right, we're back.
So one of the things that I was reading was
that at the time that these were being made, and
this goes along with our episode on Egyptian mummification. I mean,
this was a process. It wasn't just like they had
Jade's suits ready to go right. Um. These suits would
(27:09):
have taken the most skilled of jade smith's over ten
years to make. So they were either building them before
the person died, or the person died, they were probably
embalmed in some way, and then the suit was built
around them ten years after they had passed away. Now,
(27:31):
as should be obvious from that ten thousand tombs, twenty
three Jade's suit remains a figure there. These were not
for everybody. These were specifically for members of the Han aristocracy,
because ultimately, who else is going to afford a low
luxury burial item like this, UH, the the work John
Show or the Book of the Later Han. The Chinese
(27:54):
court document from this time explained that your your rank
determined what sort of jade's suit you were well suited for. Uh.
Emperors had gold threaded jade suits, vassal king's high ranking
imperial concubines and princesses had jade suits with silver thread,
and dowager concupines and sisters of the emperor lesser aristocrats
(28:15):
had suits with copper thread. I wouldn't be offended to
wear a copper one, No I would. I would. I'd
be happy with with with copper or if anybody needs
a dowager concubine call me now. Sometimes there were added decorations.
Emperor Woo's suit was decorated with imagery of the flood
dragon and other sacred creatures, and this is referred to
(28:35):
as the flood Dragon jade suit. But a lot of
them are going to be, you know, featureless polished jade. Yeah.
One thing to remember here too, is like we're thrown
down in terms of gold and silver and copper, is
that jade was more valuable in China than gold or
silver was in the West and jade crafting. As we
mentioned earlier, it achieved its height during the reign of
(28:56):
Emperor Chien long Uh, and that was from seventeen thirty
six to seventeen CE. He actually made all jade in
the country his private property, and the idea was that
if anybody tried to trade jade, it was punishable by
death because he he owned it all, regardless of whether
or not it was actually in his possession. Now this
(29:16):
ties in nicely with the next point, and that's that
evidence supports the theory that this was a There was
probably a centralized place or a couple of places for
manufacturing these suits. Um artisans would work on what was
again essentially a luxury item, So you can't just go
anywhere and get a jade suit and um. And while
these still couldn't today, yeah, I mean unless unless you
(29:38):
know a guy UM. It's also worth noting that while
these items were for specific members of Han aristocracy, there
were violations, including an account and this was shared in
a in a paper that will will sign on the
landing page by Jeffrey Cow and Yang Joe Shing. And
this was the tale of a eunuch named Joo Jong
(29:59):
who secretly buried his father in a jade suit, but
then he was found out and so the casket was
opened up uh and um and busted out, and his
entire family was imprisoned for the for the for the crime.
Think about that, I mean, like, given how difficult these
things are to make, Like somehow you secretly had one
of those, made you bury your dad in it, and
(30:19):
then you're found out and caught and just like utterly
punished for it. That's that's that's story, Yeah, I mean,
and it shows how how how important all of this
was to the culture at the time. You know, this
was this was not just you couldn't just be frivolous
and get a jade suit. No, the jade suit was
for particular members of society, and to violate uh those
(30:41):
those societal divisions was was a dire matter. Now, we
mentioned earlier how in the in the late nineteen fifties
you had this hypothesis these little jade pieces everyone was
finding were we're bits of a jade suit, but that
it wasn't until ninety eight when they found those two
tombs and heavy this is when we actually had evidence,
(31:02):
we actually had too complete recovered and ultimately restored suits
of jade armor and uh in particular, they were lushing
printaging of the Kingdom of jeong Shan. So this was
the son of the Western Han Emperor Jing and his
consort dal Juan. Now, while their bodies were undisturbed, the
(31:22):
corpses had collapsed, the casket had collapsed, but everything was
still in place. He had gold thread, she had silk.
His suit contained two thousand four jade pieces, hers contained
at two thousand, one hundred sixty And in both suits
the only the outer surfaces were polished and the inner
surfaces were scarred by circular cutting tools and straight edge tools,
(31:44):
the very tools that you referred to earlier for the
shaping of jade. Yeah. And while the jade you know,
didn't protect their bodies from decomposition as was thought, the
porous rock that was actually in this this I guess
cave is the best way to describe it, did have
absorbed a capabilities. When they were found in nineteen archaeologists
had to work through get this two brick walls and
(32:08):
a thick plate of molten iron that had been poured
between them. And this is obviously because of how bad
the grave robbing thing had become and and partially why
this one was hadn't been robbed yet, you know. Uh,
so they had to work their way through this. Lu
Sheng's body had those jade plugs that we talked about earlier.
(32:29):
He had him in his nose, ears, and mouth, and
then the little jade shields for his eyes. They also
each had guilt bronze headrests that were inlaid with jade,
and they held jade crescents in their hand. Now, the
coffin that was found on the floor that was made
of four thousand pieces of jade, and it had just
completely fallen apart into a pile on the Tumbe floor.
(32:50):
There were also lots of sculptures, as we mentioned earlier.
They they they've placed lots of little items around too
that were also made of jade, including those of a bixie,
which was a mythological powerful winged beast that averted evil.
And I included a picture in here. It's kind of
it's kind of like a dragon. It's like a cross
between like a dragon and a dog with it's got wings. Yeah,
(33:11):
I keep wanting to do like a full exploration as
if such a thing were possible. Of of Chinese dragons
because there's so many different varieties and there are a
lot of things where you look at them and you think, oh,
well that's a dragon or that's kind of a dragon turtle.
But they all have very particular identities and symbol and
symbolic power like you would and it would depend where
(33:33):
you would want to engrave one or include a statue
of one. You would protect certain certain structures. You know.
I think I pronounced that opinion wrong too, because I
just went with Bixie because it looks like it rhymes
with pixie. But I think it's supposed to be be
she Okay, So I look at it looks like a
Bixie when I can imagine his name m Pixie. I Hey,
(33:53):
there's the Pokemon of their time. I mean, this thing
looks pretty cool. It's it's kind of like a fat
chested wagon dog. Indeed, now, obviously, when we when we
look at the jade burial suits, we're looking at the
convergence of two different customs, burial in armor and the
sacred use of jade. So there are plenty of examples
of of of just normal decorative armor suits that were
(34:17):
worn by bodies prior to this, and the actually the
prince that we just referred to, I believe he was
buried with a suit of armor, and the suit of
armor was actually of more modern design, but he was
that that was just included with him, and he was
actually buried, of course, in the jade armor. Now my
understanding is these two in particular that we're referring to,
(34:39):
these are the ones that are touring around the world
and you can see them in various museum locations. Yes,
I believe so. All right, so you're probably wondering, well, then,
what happens to the jade suit. It's like, this is
a pretty fantastic tradition. Why does it fade away? Why
does something so rich and so ornate just vanish? And
the answer is interesting the answering. The answer has to
(35:01):
do with all of those plundered tombs. Yeah, it's all
about grave robbing. Yeah, and this was fascinating and disturbing
as well when we read what the the the the
the tomb raiders would do with the suits when they
pilfered them. Yeah, there were more than two dozen suits
that have been discovered since. But the reason why there
(35:24):
aren't more is because in a D two D and
twenty three Emperor when of Way ordered that the production
of them had to be stopped because of so much looting.
And what would happen is these looters would go in
and they would burn the suits solely so they could
retrieve the gold thread that was within. They didn't care
about the jade. And as you pointed out off air, well,
(35:45):
if you had these little pieces of jade that were
perfectly cut down to make a suit, you can't go
sell that on the black market because somebody is going
to know, oh, this must have come from the specific suit,
from the specific prints. But gold you can melt down
and turn in whatever you once, so you can always
come up with a story about that gold. But those
jade pieces were clearly stolen from an important person's body,
(36:07):
and you might as well just walk around with a
sign and mandarin that says execute me now. You you
refer back earlier to the poorest nature of the jade.
And there is this this idea that is put out
there that even though jade does not have any magical
body preserving properties, and you know, despite the fact that
(36:30):
no soft tissue has been been found preserved by these
funeral rights, it has been suggested that this the poorest
nature of the stone itself might actually preserve some genetic material,
and that you know, d NA might be found intermixed
with the jade. A lot of accounts of this notion
(36:50):
refer back to a piece of title Immortal Jade by
Sherry Uh to Lynco and this is published in the
Canadian Medical Journal. But to my knowledge, there's been no
actual evidence for this thus far. Okay, but I could
see why it would be an interesting avenue of research, Like,
there's some possibilities for genealogical research, especially you know, you
(37:11):
mentioned the Han ethnic group earlier. Related to that, that
could be some interesting stuff if you're looking at DNA samples. Yeah.
I think one of the problems there is that is
that that we do have Uh tombs and graves from
the Han dynasty that we're able to study and and
get genetic information from. So it's not like these would
be the one place we would find it. Yeah, and
(37:34):
this so this leads into my I know I mentioned
this earlier, but it's just it seems really weirdly offensive
that these relics are kind of pulled out of where
they were kept, trotted out across the world and displayed
in museums. I remember the High Museum here in Atlanta
had the Terracotta warriors a couple of years ago, and
they were very cool. But the so my understanding was
(37:57):
those terracotta warriors were buried with, you know, on one
very much like these jade suits were, and I felt
similar then. I don't know. I suppose if they didn't
do this, the tombs would eventually be looted by somebody.
But to me, I guess the idea more along the
lines of what you saw when you were in China
is you go to the actual site itself and you
see them that is at least like sort of compromising.
(38:20):
You're allowing them to keep these suits that they uh
that they believed we're going to protect them in the afterlife. Yeah,
I mean, I guess this gets into a more complicated
issue and and and it's gonna vary, you know, from
culture to culture, and depending how far back in time
you're going, Because I it was instantly makes me think
back to when I was at the Field Museum in Chicago.
(38:41):
Instantly we went up there for C. Two e two
and Joe and I went over there, and they have
a wonderful Native American section a lot of it devoted
to Northwest Coast Native people's and uh, you know, they
have masks, they have costumes, details about their various you know,
rich um spiritual traditions. But there's a section that they've
(39:03):
completely um marked off. You can't see into it anymore
because the display depicts uh, important artifacts from their funeral rights. Okay, yeah, okay,
So somewhere along the line, like maybe that tribe and
its current iteration said we're uncomfortable with us, please don't
do it. Yeah, so it's like a current people saying
this is we find this to be disrespectful. This needs
(39:25):
to be handled in a more appropriate manner. I'd be
curious if there's if there's anyone in China who feels
that way about this stuff, or if it's just kind
of like they've moved past that uh veneration for this
particular dynasty and they're okay with you know, sending them
around the world and having them looked at because I
(39:46):
guess in a way it spreads Chinese culture. Yeah, yeah,
it's curious. Well, if you're a listener out there and
you have any idea, maybe you've lived in China or
your Chinese yourself please let us know. I'd be curious indeed.
So so there you have it. Hopefully we've provided decent
snapshot of another just really interesting funeral tradition. Uh A
(40:07):
an artistic tradition, a time period, a little about the
mineral and the possibility of some sort of genetic material
actually being preserved by this, uh this supernaturally infused a
funeral rite. Now, I guess some people are probably thinking
that I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I started
off the episode saying I would love to see a
(40:27):
movie about a jade burial suited mummy, but at the
same time I kind of am uncomfortable about actually looking
at the real thing. So, you know, I'd be curious
if you If you've got any information about this that
we missed, please let us know. You can reach out
to us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram.
(40:48):
If you've seen these before and you've got details that
you want to let us know about, please tell us
that too, or maybe even some pictures that would be cool.
Uh do you wear jade? If you wear ja, lets
share any kind of you know, supernatural ideas that you
carry around with it, and then you can always visit
our website, which is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's right, that's where you'll find uh. All the podcasts,
(41:10):
including several of these we've mentioned, the Chinese immortality, the
ghost marriage, the various mummification episodes, the Chinese zodiac, all
of those are there, and we'll trying to include links
on the landing page for this episode. And if you
just want to write us the old fashioned way, whether
it's in English or Mandarin, you can write us at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
(41:41):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com Bla BLA twenty thirty thirty
third Ropars Parses fos By par
Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
it is Saturday. Time to go into the vault for
a classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I
think this is one that you and Christian did back
in right, Yeah, this one is about jade immortality, basically
about the the use of jade and beliefs about jade
(00:27):
from from Chinese history, particularly how it factors into the
jade armor that was used in some of these burial practices.
I believe we touched on this a little bit in
uh a later episode that you and I did, oh,
the one about the tomb of Chin Chi Huang. Yeah,
we at least touched on it as as part of
the history of of Chinese funeral traditions. Well, we hope
(00:49):
you enjoyed this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager.
(01:11):
We have kind of like a unofficial series of episodes
that we've been doing over the course of the last
two years that are related to various Asian cultures and death,
and this is another one of those. So we've talked
about ghost burial before, we've talked about Chinese immortality. Uh.
(01:32):
And then this is also slightly connected to the episode
that we did on or maybe it was two episodes
on mummification. Yeah, I feel like we've done two, maybe more.
I know that we've talked about exploring more and more
of the mummification cultures throughout the world. I know what
it is. We we discussed Japanese custom in an episode. Yeah. Oh,
(01:53):
and then there's also the monks. They have the self
mummifying monks. Yes, those guys. That's the other one. So
this is a long those lines. Today we're gonna be
talking about jade burial suits. And once I got done
researching this, my first thought was this would be a
far cooler way to make a new Mummy franchise. They've
(02:13):
been showing the trailers constantly for that New Mummy movie
with Tom Cruise that's coming out this summer, and it
looks awful, and I think that this would be a
cool mummy like this mummy in this giant suit of
jade armor coming at you. That would be so much fun. Yeah,
because you look at the images of this, and there
should be an image of one of these suits of
jade burial armor on the landing page for this episode.
(02:36):
It's stuffitable your mind dot com. It's uh, it looks
kind of like the villain in that first Thor movie,
you know, that big suit of animate armor that he
fought destroyer. Yeah, it looks kind of like the Destroyer.
It's it's beautiful, and indeed, I could see an Eastern
Mummy franchise really having some fun with this. Yeah. That
being said, I did not see the Eastern Mummy entrigue
(02:59):
like like the third or fourth Mummy film that came out.
Oh did they do something like that or did Oh?
I didn't know. I don't know what I having not
seen it, I can't speak for the mummy design. However,
I know there's a scene where yet he's attacks, so
I do kind of want to watch it for that, Huh.
I had no idea that even existed. This is like
from the nineteen nineties Mummy franchise with a Scorpion King
and all that. Yeah, this one was post Scorpion King
(03:22):
and that's about all I know about. Okay, Well, maybe
we'll talk about that one on trailer Talk when we
do a Facebook live about these episodes this week. So
in this episode, we're going we're going to be exploring
a practice that that is tied directly to the Western
Han dynasty, and we're gonna, I know a lot of
you out there are not going to have a real
(03:43):
firm handle on dynastic Chinese history. Don't worry. We're going
to root all that where it needs to be placed
in the in the timeline shortly. But these suits are
you know, we can call them jade suits, we can
call them jade armor. In the in manned in they're
sometimes referred to as you shaw, which are jade caskets,
(04:04):
or sometimes u y which are jade garments. And it
is essentially a stone garment if you think about that,
because because jade is a stone, and that's probably a
great place to start. Really, let's just discuss what jade
is before we pile on it's supernatural connotations and then
get into Chinese history. Alright, So jade is essentially an
(04:29):
ornamental green rock. Everyone has probably seen something that he's
either made of jade or is supposed to be made
of jade. But then what does that even mean, Yeah,
I'm thinking of like in the local mall that we
have here, there's like a couple like places where you
can buy sort of like Chinese themed aesthetic decorations for
(04:52):
the home, and usually there's like a piece of jade
in it somewhere, or it might be made of some
kind of fake jade. There's those um I forget what
they're called, but they have they're like red uh ribbons
or um threads and they've got a piece of jade
woven into them. Oh yeah. You often see little little
rings of jade, sometimes sometimes worn by by children in
(05:15):
China still or incorporated into some sort of direct decoration
or or personal adornment. And uh. The interesting thing here though,
is that whatever you're calling jade jade is the name
given to two distinct minerals uh neph right and jaded,
and in their purest form, either of these is white
(05:38):
uh in. In Chinese, it's referred to as mutton fat jade.
And you also have minerals such as iron and chromium
that give jade it's mini hughes. So there's not just
one color of jade. It's not like a crayola. This
is jade. Pulled it up to your stone and see
if it matches between white and like very green, yeah,
very in darker greens. Yeah. So let's talk about these
(05:59):
two varieties real quick. Uh. The nef right is sometimes
referred to as true jade. It's very strong, it has
a more vivid green coloration. And this is the stuff
that the Chinese worked with during the Han dynasty, which
is what we're gonna be talking about today, because jadeit
wasn't introduced to China until the late sixteen hundreds via Burma.
(06:20):
So when we're talking about these pieces of jade armor,
they're made using nef right, not jadeite. Now. Jadeite, on
the other hand, is more fragile, and it has a
brilliant gleaming surface when polished. Now jade is usually found
inside pebbles or boulders, where like the rough stony exterior
doesn't really give a clue as to what's in there.
(06:42):
Jade itself, it can't be chipped or flaked, so it
has to be worn down using a rough paste and
a combination of rotary discs, grinders, and tools. And during
the Han dynasty this was probably made. This paste was
made with water grease, and sand and then iron tools
had been developed specifically for the art and craft of
(07:05):
working with jade to develop and work it further into
various forms. Um So, I think this is a good
point for me to just bring up, Like I think
here in the West, Jade is sort of this very
like stereotypical attached idea to uh like the orient right,
(07:26):
It's very bound up in orientalism. Yeah. Like, do you
remember that video game came out gosh, must have been
ten fifteen years ago now, Jade Empire. I played the
hell out of that game. Oh was this that was
just a term based RPG. Yeah, it was made by
the same people who made the Knights of the Old
Republic games and the Dragon Age games. Very similar setup
(07:47):
except for this was in It had a really cool setting.
But it was like a steampunk mythological China um and
you know, as such used very like kind of stereotypical
pieces from that mythology. But still, I mean, I have
to admit, as much as I love exploring uh Asian history,
(08:07):
I also love fantasy inspired by Asian So yeah, uh
so I should I should check it out a little bit.
I don't know. It's one of those where the graphics
don't really hold up. I mean, I haven't played it
in so long. I think it was I played it
on the original Xbox. But it was fun. You got
like this various group of characters. You would have I
think like three characters at a time that would go
on these like sort of dungeon crawl missions and like
(08:29):
one would be a spell It was very D and
D but it was like we've talked about this on
the show before, the sort of like racist Oriental Adventures
D and D where they would like, you know, you'd
have a spell caster, you'd have a warrior, and you'd
have like a ninja or something like that, and they
would like go there. It was really just like a
fighter rogue and a magic user um and yeah, they'd
have these various missions. They'd fight monsters from Chinese mythology. Yeah,
(08:54):
it was fun aesthetically. So there was probably a little
jade in there, and oh yeah, yeah, I think that
the jade was a big theme in it. Yeah, well,
jade is is a big theme in uh in Chinese traditions,
So we should probably discuss what it's supernatural powers were
thought to be. We've we've given a brief overview of
(09:16):
its physical properties. Certainly you can go in deeper if
you want to. We're not really a minerals podcast, but
there's a lot of great information out there about jade
if that's your thing. As as far as supernatural qualities go, yeah,
jade was believed to have protective and preservative qualities, warding
off both decay and evil spirits. I've also read that
(09:38):
some believe jade darkens as the where gets richer, likenses
ticket poorer. So it's kind of like a mood ring
for your you know, your your financial status. That's great.
Instead of having like an app on your phone that
tells you how your bank accounts doing, you just have
like a little piece of jade, like like on one
of those red wristbands. Yeah, you meet somebody, you want
(09:59):
to know where they stand, you just take a peek
of their jade. Now. It's also worth pointing out that
in terms of just how important jade is in Chinese
tradition and mythology, you have u d the Jade Emperor,
and he stands as the supreme god in the Chinese
mythological pantheon. And if you if you actually think back
(10:20):
to the episode on the Chinese zodiac that stuff to
blow your mind did a while back. Uh, there's this
whole parable of the swimming zodiac animals in a race,
and they're racing for U D. Have you seen any
of those who movies about Dr D. I haven't. I'm
familiar with him by name, but I haven't watched their
fun You should check him out now. It's also important
(10:42):
to note that Dallas alchemists as well put put an
emphasis on jade as part of an immortality elixir that
also contained gold, silver, arsenic, and other ores, and it
was said to provide resistance to aging and decay. In fact,
in the three twenty book Po Po which means the
(11:03):
Master Embracing Simplicity, author Gee Hong wrote that gold and
jade inserted into the nine orifices prevented corpses from decaying. Okay,
so this comes up a lot today when we're talking
about this jade burial armor. And I wanna establish something here.
So I read this and I went, I had to
(11:24):
count my orifices, and I was like, I kept coming
up short. I only counted seven, and then I realized
they were counting the eyes. Yes, And it might sound
kind of grotesque. To think of eye plugs, but they're
not like corks the ice, more like their little shields.
It's kind of like when cucumbers on the eye. Yeah,
the one I was going for was how they would
(11:46):
put coins on people's eyes that they could pay the
ferryman for the river Sharon. But yeah, this is obviously
different mythology, but it's the same principle. It's like little
jade shields that went over your eyes. So apparently I
don't know if I'm wrong or right, but I never
thought of my eyes as being orifice. Is well, it's
it's where the light comes in, right, true, something's going
(12:08):
in there now. It's interesting I mentioned children wearing jade
bengals earlier and you you still see this used in China.
And this is the idea here is that this protects
the child from harm, including soul separating fright by a demon.
And uh, I actually ran across the cool source for this.
So if we if we ever want to do an
(12:29):
episode on Chinese exorcism, uh, playing off our past episodes
on exorcism, this would be a good one to seek out.
I think that's hard, yes from me, but audience, let
us know if you're interested in Chinese exorcism. Now in
terms of other associations, some traditional Chinese medicine approaches call
for the use of jade massaging tools to help I
(12:50):
was reading about using it on wrinkles on the face.
And they are also ingredients with jade in the name
in Chinese traditional medicine. They're not shy jade, such as
a jade windscreen powder that's just a dried root of
of a particular plant, but it has nothing to do
with the mineral itself. So even though like we're well
past this sort of you know, myth that jade has
(13:14):
this ability to stave off the k it's still used
in a lot of those sort of I guess homeopathic methodologies.
Like I was reading about the one of the ones, uh,
the ancient Chinese jade stone being used, like I think
they would like wrap it around your neck and it
was supposed to help you with T M J H. Yeah,
I mean it's I mean ultimately comes down to the
(13:36):
idea that here is this very beautiful, cool looking stone
that came out of the ground. Surely it's worth keeping
around for something, right. Yeah, it reminds me of hematite.
There's there's similar stuff surrounding hematite. Yeah, but just I
think in different cultures, and you know a lot of
this bleeds into into other cultures outside of China. I know,
if you if you happen to visit a Korean sauna,
(13:57):
and we have one of these in the Atlanta Era
and j June um and and I love going there.
They have these various saunas that sauna rooms that have
different minerals there, and they have one that has jade
in it. And the idea here is that quote jade
increases metabolism, improve circulation, and relieves arthritis pain. All right, now,
this is giving me an idea for a business, and
(14:19):
I'm not very entrepreneurial, so maybe somebody out there can
start this. So you combine the jade sauna idea with
the floatation sensory deprivation tank, and you build a sensory
deprivation tank out of jade, and then you climb inside
that and you float in salinated water for an hour.
(14:39):
That would be amazing because that's what that's something that's
kind of lacking with with float tank scenarios is they
are very they're very secular. Yeah, they could use a
little um mystical spicing. Yeah, yeah, that would be fun.
I'd do it. Yeah, plug plug our orifices with us,
give me nine pieces of jade. All right, Well, before
(15:02):
we get those nine pieces of jade, why don't we
take a quick break, and when we get back, we're
gonna give you a little bit of a rundown on
the Western Han dynasty. Alright, we're back. So I realized
Chinese dynastics secession can be confusing for folks. Uh and
and certainly especially if you're just going from zero trying
(15:24):
to go to from zero to fifty on it. It's
it's a lot to take. I will admit. I mean,
as some listeners know, I spent time in China as
a kid. I learned Mandarin growing up, and I lived
in Singapore during high school, and Chinese history is completely
lost on me. It's really tough for me to keep
track of it. Yeah, I I'm constantly referring back to
(15:45):
the chart with the with the dynasty's. Now. I know
there's a little song I've heard people sing this where
it's Fred Fred Jacka, except it's it's the different dynasties.
I have not heard that, Okay, I when I say
I've heard it, I've I've seen a video with two
old white Chinese scholars singing it to each other as
(16:05):
an example of something you learn in school when you're
learning about Chinese sisters. All right, so it's like a
new modic device. Yeah, okay, so we're not gonna throw
it all at you. Basically, we're gonna go from the
beginning up until the Han dynasty just and throughout the years,
so you can place it in the general time frame.
And uh, the Han dynasty is essentially the fourth or
(16:26):
fifth dynasty or the second Imperial Dynasty. It ultimately depends
on what you count as a dynasty. Uh. And and
this has to do with sort of a legendary mythic time.
So let's start from the beginning. First, up, you have
the Shod dynasty. This is to six b C. And
it's largely mythological, with some very early Bronze Age evidence.
(16:51):
So yeah, this is the time of gods and heroes
and so. And this is why some don't actually count
this in terms of historical dynasties. But then comes the
Shan dynasty, and this was long considered apocryphal, but his
historians now correlated with oracle Bone writings. This period takes
us up to roughly even twenty three b C. And
(17:14):
the Joe dynasty. Now this is the first millennium BC,
and this is a time of conflict in China. And
there are two periods here that are a particular note,
and that's the Spring and Autumn from seven eighty one
b C and the Warring States period four through to
b C. Okay, So what I'm seeing here so far
is it seems like these dynasties lasts you know, roughly
(17:36):
around five years. Yeah, yeah, so so far. Now, at
the end of the Warring States period, the Chin Dynasty begins,
and this is when the Chin Kingdom conquered other central
Chinese states and became the first truly imperial dynasty under
Chin cha Hung, the first Emperor of China. And it
(17:58):
was during this rule that the Northern Border Wall was implemented,
what we now call the Great Wall, and in the
first of many peasant uprisings to to echo through Chinese history,
Lubang rose up and conquered China to found finally the
Han dynasty and two oh six b c E. And
this was only you know, fifteen years later, Okay. So
(18:20):
this this is where we're zoning in on in terms
of this jade burial armor being created, right, But there's
obviously many dynasties afterwards. So yeah, the Han dynasty is
is big money early on like this is uh, this
is again a time of things coming together, of unity.
Certainly there's still lots of lingering problems as with any
imperial scenario, but but it's it's a time where, uh,
(18:44):
where there's a there's enough there are enough riches out there,
there's enough specialization that you can have something like a
fancy funeral tradition take place. Now, overall, the Han dynasty
run ran from two o two or two oh six
b C until two one CE, so you were talking
about a pretty long stretch here, uh, and that at
(19:06):
the end of this in to C that's when everything
splits into the three kingdoms. But we divided the Han
dynasty up into the first the former or Western Han dynasty,
and the and also the later or Eastern Han dynasty.
And that's because in the midst of this uh, this
long you know, four century stretch, you have a rebellion
(19:27):
take place, and so and basically what happens is Han
dynasty official Wang Mang sees his power and UH and
and this is referred to as the Shin dynasty nine
through D. He does a pretty poor job. And then
the hans A reclaimed power in twenty a d after
besieging the Imperial Palace. He dies in the process. So
(19:50):
in other words, you have to four hundred years of
of Han rule. But there's this one little period where
a usurper, like a twenty period or actually less than
twenty years of this one guy ruling and they just
getting taken down. So again, this is an influential four
centuries in Chinese history saw the institution of Confucian norms,
(20:12):
the roots of the imperial examination system, UH, the an
age of great economic, technological, cultural, and social progress. Hans
still refers to the main Chinese ethnic group. And this
is again also the period that gives us these these
amazing jade burial suits. Okay, so we've teased enough. What's
a jade burial suit? Because I think when I first
(20:34):
heard about this, my thought was that it was like
Iron Man, and it was, but iron Man made of jade,
and that's not correct. There's thousands of little pieces and
these things. Yeah, it's between two thousand and four thousand
of these little jade pieces, all of its sewn together,
and it's sewn together depending on your station, it might
be gold, silver, or silk. So really the suit described
(21:00):
option is probably better. This is a a suit made
for a corpse, and it's a suit made of maybe
you know, mostly stone, and maybe gold and silver or
silk as well. I can't imagine that a living person
could wear one of these and and move. It would
be incredibly heavy. Yeah, only a supernatural um, you know,
(21:20):
undead being in Hollywood movie could do it. Now, we
referred back to our episode on ghost burial earlier, and
and I do want to touch on on that real
quick because one of a couple of the ideas we
discussed in there are central to understanding why this much
care was was taken, uh, you know for a dead individual.
So we we discussed the importance of siao the filial
(21:46):
pity and Chinese tradition is rooted in Dallas to philosophy
Confucian family values, and it concerns the undying nature of
the human soul. You know, the dead live on in
the afterlife. Uh. And then they're also tied to this
Chinese no of of of structural completeness, right, that you
have this this basic unity of the family and if everything,
(22:06):
if anything, is out of out of place there, it's
going to cause disharmony in your life and potentially in
the afterlife. Yeah, we went into far greater detail on
this in the Ghost Burial episode, but I wanted to
reference a USA Today article that was specifically about the
jade burial suits and how it referred to this to
for Western readers. So it claims that tombs in general
(22:30):
were thought to be portals between the living and the dead.
And basically the concept was, and this is similar to
what we went over in Ghost Burial, the soul was divided.
There's one part of the soul that goes to heaven,
the other part stays in the body, and the one
that's in the body had to be appeased or else
it would turn evil, while the one that goes to
heaven acted on behalf of the loved ones by offering
(22:51):
them either protection or good fortune. And this is why
the living tried to ensure that the deceased were well
provided for in death. So you get very similar death
rituals to the Egyptians in that like people are buried
with their things, with things that they think will keep
them comfortable. Yeah, there's this this this mix though with
(23:12):
the the ancestor of veneration that it's not only is
this somebody that deserved a proper burial and deserves to
be you know, buried and with the things that they loved.
This is also someone who can speak on your behalf
in the afterlife, Like, this is an important contact to have.
So you want them to be happy, You want to
do right by them. So the very first one of
(23:33):
these suits, which is part of that, was documented in
literature around a d three twenty. But that's documented in literature.
We didn't find them until far afterward. Yeah, it wasn't
until nineteen fifty eight that the suit hypothesis here that
that these little jade pieces we were we were finding
were part of the jade suit. You know, it was
(23:55):
just a theory at the time. And uh, it wasn't
until we actually found a really undisturbed tomb nine in nine,
two tombs and heavy and this is where we found
tombs undisturbed by looters or mining efforts, and it resulted
in two complete, recovered and restored suits of jade armor.
And this is quite a story. And if you've you know, well,
(24:17):
we're going to talk about this, but museums here in
the United States have had these suits one or the
other brought around on tour basically, right, And so it's
possible that you've actually seen one of these sort of
restructured and put on display in a museum here in
the West. But uh, that's weird to me. I'll talk
(24:38):
about it more later after we get through it, but
I think it's a little it's it seems slightly offensive
to me, especially given the nature of why it was
built in the first place. Now you mentioned restored, and
that's key because if you see one of these new
museum on display, it is almost assuredly been restored because
despite the ideas tied up with jade, jade doesn't or
(24:58):
at least the jade suit is it was executed, does
not actually preserve the body. So the body ends up
rotting away, there's nothing left but bone. The suit collapses,
and then sometimes the casket collapses as well on top
of it, so everything has to be put back together.
Now you actually have seen one, right, Uh, yeah, I
think I've seen a couple, but the one that I
(25:19):
got to see in China is the one that impressed
me the most. It was at the Museum of the
Western Han Dynasty, Mausoleum of the Nanyu King and Guang Show.
So I was there with my wife, my my my
newly acquired son. He was not impressed at all as
I strolled him around in the stroke how old was he?
(25:39):
Though he was like two or three, he was like
he was one and a half. He was not having
any of it. But but the tomb was. It was
really impressive for me anyway. Uh. It was a hidden
twenty meters sixty five point six ft underground and the
king himself was covered with with a with a silk
(25:59):
and two thousand two pieces of jade to compose his suit.
And the whole tomb really had the feel of just
a cosmic vessel, and that this was the suit of
a of a necronot, you know. Uh yeah, but very
much in keeping with with the feeling that I get
from from any kind of Egyptian artifacts. Now a number
of other such jade suits accompanied by hordes of silks,
(26:22):
lacquer ware, figurines, and bronzes. You'll find these displayed in
many Chinese museums. H they turn up as you pointed out,
in an international Collections and Traveling Exhibits and three count
from the Institute of Archaeology and Beijing claimed ten thousand
Han tombs had been discovered, and this resulted in twenty
tombs with twenty three jade suit remain. All right, we're
(26:46):
gonna take a quick break and then when we come back,
we'll jump right back into it. All right, we're back.
So one of the things that I was reading was
that at the time that these were being made, and
this goes along with our episode on Egyptian mummification. I mean,
this was a process. It wasn't just like they had
Jade's suits ready to go right. Um. These suits would
(27:09):
have taken the most skilled of jade smith's over ten
years to make. So they were either building them before
the person died, or the person died, they were probably
embalmed in some way, and then the suit was built
around them ten years after they had passed away. Now,
(27:31):
as should be obvious from that ten thousand tombs, twenty
three Jade's suit remains a figure there. These were not
for everybody. These were specifically for members of the Han aristocracy,
because ultimately, who else is going to afford a low
luxury burial item like this, UH, the the work John
Show or the Book of the Later Han. The Chinese
(27:54):
court document from this time explained that your your rank
determined what sort of jade's suit you were well suited for. Uh.
Emperors had gold threaded jade suits, vassal king's high ranking
imperial concubines and princesses had jade suits with silver thread,
and dowager concupines and sisters of the emperor lesser aristocrats
(28:15):
had suits with copper thread. I wouldn't be offended to
wear a copper one, No I would. I would. I'd
be happy with with with copper or if anybody needs
a dowager concubine call me now. Sometimes there were added decorations.
Emperor Woo's suit was decorated with imagery of the flood
dragon and other sacred creatures, and this is referred to
(28:35):
as the flood Dragon jade suit. But a lot of
them are going to be, you know, featureless polished jade. Yeah.
One thing to remember here too, is like we're thrown
down in terms of gold and silver and copper, is
that jade was more valuable in China than gold or
silver was in the West and jade crafting. As we
mentioned earlier, it achieved its height during the reign of
(28:56):
Emperor Chien long Uh, and that was from seventeen thirty
six to seventeen CE. He actually made all jade in
the country his private property, and the idea was that
if anybody tried to trade jade, it was punishable by
death because he he owned it all, regardless of whether
or not it was actually in his possession. Now this
(29:16):
ties in nicely with the next point, and that's that
evidence supports the theory that this was a There was
probably a centralized place or a couple of places for
manufacturing these suits. Um artisans would work on what was
again essentially a luxury item, So you can't just go
anywhere and get a jade suit and um. And while
these still couldn't today, yeah, I mean unless unless you
(29:38):
know a guy UM. It's also worth noting that while
these items were for specific members of Han aristocracy, there
were violations, including an account and this was shared in
a in a paper that will will sign on the
landing page by Jeffrey Cow and Yang Joe Shing. And
this was the tale of a eunuch named Joo Jong
(29:59):
who secretly buried his father in a jade suit, but
then he was found out and so the casket was
opened up uh and um and busted out, and his
entire family was imprisoned for the for the for the crime.
Think about that, I mean, like, given how difficult these
things are to make, Like somehow you secretly had one
of those, made you bury your dad in it, and
(30:19):
then you're found out and caught and just like utterly
punished for it. That's that's that's story, Yeah, I mean,
and it shows how how how important all of this
was to the culture at the time. You know, this
was this was not just you couldn't just be frivolous
and get a jade suit. No, the jade suit was
for particular members of society, and to violate uh those
(30:41):
those societal divisions was was a dire matter. Now, we
mentioned earlier how in the in the late nineteen fifties
you had this hypothesis these little jade pieces everyone was
finding were we're bits of a jade suit, but that
it wasn't until ninety eight when they found those two
tombs and heavy this is when we actually had evidence,
(31:02):
we actually had too complete recovered and ultimately restored suits
of jade armor and uh in particular, they were lushing
printaging of the Kingdom of jeong Shan. So this was
the son of the Western Han Emperor Jing and his
consort dal Juan. Now, while their bodies were undisturbed, the
(31:22):
corpses had collapsed, the casket had collapsed, but everything was
still in place. He had gold thread, she had silk.
His suit contained two thousand four jade pieces, hers contained
at two thousand, one hundred sixty And in both suits
the only the outer surfaces were polished and the inner
surfaces were scarred by circular cutting tools and straight edge tools,
(31:44):
the very tools that you referred to earlier for the
shaping of jade. Yeah. And while the jade you know,
didn't protect their bodies from decomposition as was thought, the
porous rock that was actually in this this I guess
cave is the best way to describe it, did have
absorbed a capabilities. When they were found in nineteen archaeologists
had to work through get this two brick walls and
(32:08):
a thick plate of molten iron that had been poured
between them. And this is obviously because of how bad
the grave robbing thing had become and and partially why
this one was hadn't been robbed yet, you know. Uh,
so they had to work their way through this. Lu
Sheng's body had those jade plugs that we talked about earlier.
(32:29):
He had him in his nose, ears, and mouth, and
then the little jade shields for his eyes. They also
each had guilt bronze headrests that were inlaid with jade,
and they held jade crescents in their hand. Now, the
coffin that was found on the floor that was made
of four thousand pieces of jade, and it had just
completely fallen apart into a pile on the Tumbe floor.
(32:50):
There were also lots of sculptures, as we mentioned earlier.
They they they've placed lots of little items around too
that were also made of jade, including those of a bixie,
which was a mythological powerful winged beast that averted evil.
And I included a picture in here. It's kind of
it's kind of like a dragon. It's like a cross
between like a dragon and a dog with it's got wings. Yeah,
(33:11):
I keep wanting to do like a full exploration as
if such a thing were possible. Of of Chinese dragons
because there's so many different varieties and there are a
lot of things where you look at them and you think, oh,
well that's a dragon or that's kind of a dragon turtle.
But they all have very particular identities and symbol and
symbolic power like you would and it would depend where
(33:33):
you would want to engrave one or include a statue
of one. You would protect certain certain structures. You know.
I think I pronounced that opinion wrong too, because I
just went with Bixie because it looks like it rhymes
with pixie. But I think it's supposed to be be
she Okay, So I look at it looks like a
Bixie when I can imagine his name m Pixie. I Hey,
(33:53):
there's the Pokemon of their time. I mean, this thing
looks pretty cool. It's it's kind of like a fat
chested wagon dog. Indeed, now, obviously, when we when we
look at the jade burial suits, we're looking at the
convergence of two different customs, burial in armor and the
sacred use of jade. So there are plenty of examples
of of of just normal decorative armor suits that were
(34:17):
worn by bodies prior to this, and the actually the
prince that we just referred to, I believe he was
buried with a suit of armor, and the suit of
armor was actually of more modern design, but he was
that that was just included with him, and he was
actually buried, of course, in the jade armor. Now my
understanding is these two in particular that we're referring to,
(34:39):
these are the ones that are touring around the world
and you can see them in various museum locations. Yes,
I believe so. All right, so you're probably wondering, well, then,
what happens to the jade suit. It's like, this is
a pretty fantastic tradition. Why does it fade away? Why
does something so rich and so ornate just vanish? And
the answer is interesting the answering. The answer has to
(35:01):
do with all of those plundered tombs. Yeah, it's all
about grave robbing. Yeah, and this was fascinating and disturbing
as well when we read what the the the the
the tomb raiders would do with the suits when they
pilfered them. Yeah, there were more than two dozen suits
that have been discovered since. But the reason why there
(35:24):
aren't more is because in a D two D and
twenty three Emperor when of Way ordered that the production
of them had to be stopped because of so much looting.
And what would happen is these looters would go in
and they would burn the suits solely so they could
retrieve the gold thread that was within. They didn't care
about the jade. And as you pointed out off air, well,
(35:45):
if you had these little pieces of jade that were
perfectly cut down to make a suit, you can't go
sell that on the black market because somebody is going
to know, oh, this must have come from the specific suit,
from the specific prints. But gold you can melt down
and turn in whatever you once, so you can always
come up with a story about that gold. But those
jade pieces were clearly stolen from an important person's body,
(36:07):
and you might as well just walk around with a
sign and mandarin that says execute me now. You you
refer back earlier to the poorest nature of the jade.
And there is this this idea that is put out
there that even though jade does not have any magical
body preserving properties, and you know, despite the fact that
(36:30):
no soft tissue has been been found preserved by these
funeral rights, it has been suggested that this the poorest
nature of the stone itself might actually preserve some genetic material,
and that you know, d NA might be found intermixed
with the jade. A lot of accounts of this notion
(36:50):
refer back to a piece of title Immortal Jade by
Sherry Uh to Lynco and this is published in the
Canadian Medical Journal. But to my knowledge, there's been no
actual evidence for this thus far. Okay, but I could
see why it would be an interesting avenue of research, Like,
there's some possibilities for genealogical research, especially you know, you
(37:11):
mentioned the Han ethnic group earlier. Related to that, that
could be some interesting stuff if you're looking at DNA samples. Yeah.
I think one of the problems there is that is
that that we do have Uh tombs and graves from
the Han dynasty that we're able to study and and
get genetic information from. So it's not like these would
be the one place we would find it. Yeah, and
(37:34):
this so this leads into my I know I mentioned
this earlier, but it's just it seems really weirdly offensive
that these relics are kind of pulled out of where
they were kept, trotted out across the world and displayed
in museums. I remember the High Museum here in Atlanta
had the Terracotta warriors a couple of years ago, and
they were very cool. But the so my understanding was
(37:57):
those terracotta warriors were buried with, you know, on one
very much like these jade suits were, and I felt
similar then. I don't know. I suppose if they didn't
do this, the tombs would eventually be looted by somebody.
But to me, I guess the idea more along the
lines of what you saw when you were in China
is you go to the actual site itself and you
see them that is at least like sort of compromising.
(38:20):
You're allowing them to keep these suits that they uh
that they believed we're going to protect them in the afterlife. Yeah,
I mean, I guess this gets into a more complicated
issue and and and it's gonna vary, you know, from
culture to culture, and depending how far back in time
you're going, Because I it was instantly makes me think
back to when I was at the Field Museum in Chicago.
(38:41):
Instantly we went up there for C. Two e two
and Joe and I went over there, and they have
a wonderful Native American section a lot of it devoted
to Northwest Coast Native people's and uh, you know, they
have masks, they have costumes, details about their various you know,
rich um spiritual traditions. But there's a section that they've
(39:03):
completely um marked off. You can't see into it anymore
because the display depicts uh, important artifacts from their funeral rights. Okay, yeah, okay,
So somewhere along the line, like maybe that tribe and
its current iteration said we're uncomfortable with us, please don't
do it. Yeah, so it's like a current people saying
this is we find this to be disrespectful. This needs
(39:25):
to be handled in a more appropriate manner. I'd be
curious if there's if there's anyone in China who feels
that way about this stuff, or if it's just kind
of like they've moved past that uh veneration for this
particular dynasty and they're okay with you know, sending them
around the world and having them looked at because I
(39:46):
guess in a way it spreads Chinese culture. Yeah, yeah,
it's curious. Well, if you're a listener out there and
you have any idea, maybe you've lived in China or
your Chinese yourself please let us know. I'd be curious indeed.
So so there you have it. Hopefully we've provided decent
snapshot of another just really interesting funeral tradition. Uh A
(40:07):
an artistic tradition, a time period, a little about the
mineral and the possibility of some sort of genetic material
actually being preserved by this, uh this supernaturally infused a
funeral rite. Now, I guess some people are probably thinking
that I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I started
off the episode saying I would love to see a
(40:27):
movie about a jade burial suited mummy, but at the
same time I kind of am uncomfortable about actually looking
at the real thing. So, you know, I'd be curious
if you If you've got any information about this that
we missed, please let us know. You can reach out
to us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram.
(40:48):
If you've seen these before and you've got details that
you want to let us know about, please tell us
that too, or maybe even some pictures that would be cool.
Uh do you wear jade? If you wear ja, lets
share any kind of you know, supernatural ideas that you
carry around with it, and then you can always visit
our website, which is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's right, that's where you'll find uh. All the podcasts,
(41:10):
including several of these we've mentioned, the Chinese immortality, the
ghost marriage, the various mummification episodes, the Chinese zodiac, all
of those are there, and we'll trying to include links
on the landing page for this episode. And if you
just want to write us the old fashioned way, whether
it's in English or Mandarin, you can write us at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
(41:41):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com Bla BLA twenty thirty thirty
third Ropars Parses fos By par
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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Joe McCormick
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