僰人悬棺之谜

PUZZLE OF BO PEOPLE'S HAN GING COFFIN

在高高的山岩上,在幽幽的森林里,在漫长而黑暗的历史的河流中有一个古老而神秘的民族,没有人知道他们是从哪里来的,正如也同样没有人知道他们后来到底归于何方一样.自先秦以来,这个民族的历史开始零星地散见于史料中.

Hanging coffin was peculiar means for the Bo people to bury the dead in China in ancient times, which waspracticed in 13 provinces including Sichuan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou, Fujian and Taiwan. The most concentrated distribution of hanging coffins numbering 250 is in Luobiao and Caiying townships of Gongxian County, and even some 300 remnants of hanging coffins on the cliffs along the Fengxiang Gorge and the Daning River, a tributary of the Yangtze River in The three Gorges area, Sichuan Province. Customs vary with the change of times. Each brown coffin hung highly on cliffside looks as if it were an exclamation mark, which gives viewers much food for thought and arouses the interest of numerous people, who rack their brains over the questions: how did the ancients place a coffin weighing hundreds of kilograms on a cliff face generally 50 m - several 100 m above the ground? How did they place some coffins on an inclination of near or over 90 degrees? Why almost all the coffins were hung or placed highly in the caves bored into steep cliffs by the rushing currents of rivers? It is unimaginable for an empty-handed man to climb to that altitude on such precipitous cliffs, not to say to carry those heavy coffins and place them well. Then, Now those coffins were hung so high on the precipice remains an unaccountable puzzle for the Chinese and foreign archaeological circles.