Un área de entierro de 300 años de antigüedad, en la que dos cuerpos fueron reducidos a esqueletos mientras que uno estaba perfectamente conservado, ha dejado desconcertados a los arqueólogos chinos.
Cuando se abrió uno de los ataúdes, el rostro del hombre, aseguran los expertos, estaba perfectamente conservado.
Sin embargo, en cuestión de horas, la cara comenzó a ponerse negra y un olor desagradable comenzó a emanar del cuerpo.
Arqueólogos chinos desconcertados están estudiando un ataúd de 300 años encontrado con otros dos en los que dos de los cuerpos habían sido reducidos a esqueletos, pero en el que el tercero estaba casi perfectamente conservado.
La piel del cadáver, que ahora ha sido llevado a la universidad local para su estudio, también se volvió negra.
Se cree que el cuerpo es de la dinastía Qing.
It was unearthed on October 10 on a construction site in a two metre-deep hole in the ground at Xiangcheng in Henan province, central China.
Dr Lukas Nickel, a specialist in Chinese art and archaeology at SOAS, University of London, told MailOnline that preservations such as these were not intentional.
‘The Chinese did not do any treatment of the body to preserve it as known from ancient Egypt, for instance.
‘They did, however, try to protect the body by putting it into massive coffins and stable tomb chambers.
‘So the integrity of the physical structure of the body was important to them. In early China, at least, one expected the ԀeαԀ person to live on in the tomb.’
Occasionally bodies in the Qing Dynasty were preserved by the natural conditions around the coffin.
In this case, the body may have had a lacquered coffin, covered in charcoal – which was common at the time. This means bacteria would have been unable to get in.
Dr Nickel added that if this was the case, as soon as air hit the body, the natural process would be for it to turn black and quickly disintegrate.
When the coffin was opened by historians at Xiangcheng said the man’s face was almost normal but within hours it had started to go black, and a foul smell had appeared
Historian Dong Hsiung said: ‘The clothes on the body indicate he was a very senior official from the early Qing Dynasty.
‘What is amazing is the way time seems to be catching up on the corpse, ageing hundreds of years in a day.’
The Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1912, followed the Ming dynasty and was the last imperial dynasty of China before the creation of the Republic of China.
Under the Qing territory, the empire grew to three times its size and the population increased from around 150 million to 450 million.
The present-day boundaries of China are largely based on the territory controlled by the Qing dynasty
Burial rituals in the Qing Dynasty were the responsiblity of the eldest son, and would have included a large number of officials.
Professor Dong proposes an alternative theory for the preservation. ‘It’s possible the man’s family used some materials to preserve the body,’ he said. ‘Once it was opened the natural process of decay could really start.’
‘We are working hard though to save what there is.’
El historiador Dong Hsiung dijo: “La ropa del cuerpo indica que era un funcionario de alto rango de principios de la dinastía Qing”. Lo sorprendente es la forma en que el tiempo parece estar alcanzando al cadáver, envejeciendo cientos de años en un día.
