Unexpected Discovery

About 100 m north of the railway station is the Huanghe River valley. The steeply sloping valley walls and and deep gully meant the area was home to scattered farms for thousands of years. Nobody ever thought about what might be buried beneath the earth.

In 1989, Sanmenxia city's Huixing village planned to build new houses in the valley for local residents. Some villagers found ancient tombs when they were building the houses and began to secretly steal the relics. The thefts were reported to the police in December 1989, and archeologists began to clear the site of the robbed tombs the following February.

The first excavation site, the No. 1 Tomb, is 5.3 m long from south to north, and 3.55 m wide from east to west. When archeologists arrived at the site they were disheartened by its condition. The biggest robbery hole at the south end of the grave seemed endless at 11 m deep, but fortunately it didn't quite reach the bottom. Only 40 cm beneath the hole, the funerary objects lay untouched.

Many high quality bronze wares were discovered including a set of bells. The biggest bell weighs 30 kilos and the set is the only complete set of its kind from the late Western Zhou Dynasty that has been discovered. All 35 ritual and musical instruments found were inscribed with the characters guo ji meaning the owner was a man called Guo Ji. These ritual and musical instruments show that Guo Ji was the monarch of Guo State.

Among the wealth of orderly arranged relics, one of the most precious is an iron sword with a jade handle and bronze core. The remains of the sword measure 34.2 cm, and it was originally wrapped in silk and put in a leather scabbard. Obviously, the sword was very favored by its owner, and it demonstrates that Chinese were already able to make refined weapons from multiple materials.

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