Nanchang Administration for Relics of Haihunhou State of Han Dynasty

The Cemetery of Liuhe, the Marquis of Haihun of the Western Han Dynasty, is located on the Jiudun Mountain about 800 meters northeast of the Laoqiu Villager Group of Guanxi Village, Datangping Township, Xinjian District, Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province. Archaeological investigations and excavations have shown that the Liuhe Cemetery of Haihunhou is a well-preserved Han Dynasty Liehou Cemetery with a complete structure, clear layout, and has important academic value for studying the system of the Liehou Garden in the Western Han Dynasty. Among them, the main tomb of Haihunhou Liuhe's tomb is large in scale. There is a 7-meter-high bucket-shaped tomb on the top and a "A"-shaped tomb underneath. The tomb has a square wooden structure with an area of ​​400 square meters. The coffin chamber is composed of corridors, east-west carriages and horses, cloister-shaped storage pavilion, and main coffin chamber. It is well-designed, complex in structure, and clear and clear in function. It is a typical model of the Liehou hierarchical tomb in the middle and late Western Han Dynasty. The system provides important information.

...

5. Remains of the fourth layer of the inner coffin

After removing the colored glaze sheet, it was found that there was a set of gold cakes with the same relative distance and the same specifications. This layer of remains consists of 100 gold cakes totaling 20 in the vertical direction and 5 in the horizontal direction (Figure 13). Each gold cake has a diameter of about 6 cm, a thickness of about 1 cm, and a weight of about 250 grams. The weight difference is within 1 gram.

From the appearance of the gold cake, the edges and bottom part are very smooth, the middle area of ​​the bottom end is slightly concave upward, and the upper surface layer is in the form of honeycomb. The existence of this situation is related to the mold for casting gold cakes, and the main reason should be the temperature difference between the mold and the cast metal liquid and the poor exhaust. Most of the hundred golden cakes are plain noodles, and only a few have very regular V-shaped symbols at the bottom (Figure 14). This is the mark left during mold processing. In addition, there are also several gold cakes with different numbers of words engraved on the smooth bottom after the casting is completed (Figure 15).

Due to the influence of multiple factors such as the long burying time, the small size and large specific gravity of the gold cakes, and the weight of the upper layer and the weight of the soil, after the gold cakes were extracted one by one, a hundred pits of different depths were left on the surface of the inner coffin floor. The nest (Figure 16) represents the placement of each golden cake.

...

(Written by: Li Cunxin, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; the original publication was published in "Cultural Relics" Issue 6, 2020)