Passing by Bailuyuan and paying homage to the tomb of the little prince of the Tang Dynasty, Qi Yuanshan took his wife and daughter into Xi'an City.

He visited the local military and political chief and brought a handwritten letter from Wu Peifu, the direct boss. The warlords of Shaanxi have been fighting for many years, and the people have long been exhausted, so they can only bow down to Beijing. Unexpectedly, the warlord suggested that the liaison office be set up in Qianxian County, more than 100 miles northwest of Xi'an. Qi Yuanshan asked, why not in Xi'an City? The warlord said that the situation in Qianxian County was dangerous, and it was an important place to control and choke the northwest. In fact, the warlord just didn't want to hand over power easily, so he naturally wanted to send Qi Yuanshan to a poor and remote country, so as not to make a small report next to the couch every day.

In the year of Gengzi, the Eight-Nation Coalition broke Beijing, and the Empress Dowager Cixi fled to Xi'an. Qi Yuanshan and Anna stayed in the city for one night, ate the mutton steamed buns of the Muslims at the North Courtyard Gate, and left the Xi'an city wall the next day.

Although Qi Yuanshan was young, he was after all a liaison officer sent by Beijing, and the warlord sent a cavalry company to guard it, plus an engineer company, to prepare for the construction of the barracks of the liaison office. After crossing the Wei River, the men and horses walked for three days and three nights under the scorching sun before arriving at Qianxian. Cracked fields, ravines and ravines are everywhere on the road, cloudless and soil erosion.

The liaison office demarcated by the warlords is not in the county seat, but in Qianling, in the north of the city.

"Qianling?" Anna, whose face was covered with dust and bumpy carriages, protected her infant daughter, "But the Qianling Tomb where Tang Gaozong Li Zhi and Empress Wu Zetian were buried together?" ”

There is no need for Qi Yuanshan to explain, there are two small hills in front of it, which resemble a young woman's breasts, commonly known as Nipple Mountain.

Cavalry and sappers crossed between the two hills and descended on a straight north-south Shinto path. Anna and Jiuse had just worshiped the little prince of the Tang Dynasty in Bailuyuan, and now they came to see his grandparents again. In the midsummer of August, from Shanghai to Shaanxi, more than 2,000 miles, from the 20th century to the Tang Dynasty 1,200 years ago, it was worth the trip.

Outside the Qianling Vermilion Bird Gate, there are dozens of stone statues, dressed in Western Regions Hu clothes, all without heads, this is the "Sixty-one Fan Chen Statue". In front of these headless horsemen, there were dozens of men kneeling, tied up with flowers, blue noses and swollen faces. It turned out to be a group of tomb robbers, taking advantage of the chaos to frantically rob and dig ancient tombs. It happened that a local infantry regiment from Shaanxi passed by and captured all these people.

"Have you ever excavated the Qianling Tomb?"

Qi Yuanshan remembered the secret of the Qianling Tomb in Qin Beiyang's mouth, the legendary tomb of the Son of Heaven and endless treasures, and buried under the huge and friendless mausoleum in front of him?

The tomb robber shook his head with a sad face, not that he had not thought about digging the Qianling, but no matter what kind of feng shui method was used, he could not judge the location of the tomb entrance. They used the method of digging a hole directly, but as soon as the shovel fell into the soil, they felt that they had hit a diamond diamond, and either the tiger's mouth was cracked or the shovel handle was broken.

Eventually, hail fell.

"The hailstones in July smashed our heads and bleed, and our eldest brother was smashed on the spot." The tomb robber who spoke was only in his twenties, but it didn't matter if he died, probably this industry was a high-risk business, and he had long been used to being an outlaw, "but we didn't believe in evil, and when the hail passed, we dug for a whole night before we pulled out a hole the size of a bowl." Suddenly, there was a rumbling sound underground. When we looked up again, a few of us were gone, leaving only a puddle of water in the dirt, and we turned around and ran away. ”

Qi Yuanshan said to himself: "Duqianling is not close, and there is wind and rain when it is near." ”

No wonder, Wu Zetian's Qianling Mausoleum is the only Tang Dynasty emperor's mausoleum that has not been excavated for thousands of years.

"We thought to ourselves that we can't come out to work this time, right? He dug up several tombs near the Qianling Tomb. Around the imperial mausoleum of the Tang Dynasty, there must be princes and ministers and relatives of the emperor who accompanied the burial of the emperor's old son. Within a month, we visited more than 100 tombs within a radius of 20 miles. Some failed to dig the entrance to the tomb, some had already been stolen, and some were deceitful empty mounds. The treasures that are really dug up are only about a dozen graves. ”

Qi Yuanshan no longer spoke, and it was inconvenient for him to interfere in the local civil affairs. But he had read the statutes of the Qing Dynasty, "Whoever excavates a grave and sees a coffin will have a hundred rods and three thousand miles; Those who have opened the coffin and see the corpse will be hanged", the old rule, tomb robbery is exiled to the ends of the earth, and the grave is executed, but the whole corpse can be kept, after all, tomb robbery violates the dead and not the living. However, the execution of the death penalty in the former Qing Dynasty had complicated procedures, which had to be approved by the prefectures, counties, provinces, and even the imperial court, and finally by the emperor's imperial pen before he could be beheaded or hanged after the autumn.

However, in the Republic of China era, the judiciary degenerated to the point of careless regard for human life, and many local officials and warlords killed if they wanted, and there was no trial system. The tomb robbers in front of me were just arrested last night, and today they will be paraded through the streets and publicly shot. Regardless of whether the main offender is an accomplice, a grave digger or a windbreaker, there is not a single living hole left. The seized tomb robberies have been privately divided among the officers. The execution ground was set up in front of the "61 Fan Chen Statue" in Qianling, and Wu Zetian was to pray for forgiveness with the blood of tomb robbers. This is also a local legend, I am afraid that once the Qianling Tomb is dug up, there will be a catastrophe.

Anna hid back in the carriage with her daughter in her arms, and when she heard the gunshots of the collective execution of the tomb robbers, she was so shocked that Nine Colors cried on the spot. She could only untie the placket and put the nipple into the baby's mouth.

Qi Yuanshan is not stage frightened, he is a man who has experienced battlefield killings, and has witnessed dozens of tomb robbers being shot to death indiscriminately, and blood flowing in front of the headless stone statue of the Tang Dynasty. In order to ensure that there were no survivors, the soldiers poked the back vest of the corpse with bayonets, and then dragged the dead away and threw them into the mass grave behind Nitou Mountain, which was considered a martyrdom for Empress Wu Zetian.

The cavalry dismounted, and the sappers set up camp, passing through this bloody and flying execution ground, passing stone horses, camels, and Weng Zhong on both sides of the Shinto. But seeing that the stone horse was carved with wings, Anna remembered the dream on the eve of her daughter's birth, the small town tomb beast that flew in from the moonlight of the Gobi Desert.

In front of the two tall earthen ques, there are two magnificent stone tablets arranged side by side - on the left is the Shusheng Ji tablet of Gaozong Li Zhi, engraved with a 5,000-character inscription written by Wu Zetian himself. The one on the right is the female emperor's own wordless tablet.

There is no word tablet, not a word. Is it the merit that is left for future generations to comment? Or is Wu Zetian consciously meritorious, which is beyond the reach of any words?

Different from the seven-section stone monument erected for her husband, Wu Zetian gave himself a complete boulder, as high as the sky, weighing 100 tons. Stone excavation has been as difficult as the Shu road to reach the sky, after the simple processing of the stonemason, and then to transport down the steep valley, through the white deer plain and other loess plateau, and then cross the Weishui, the mountains and rivers are bumpy, how many lives will be sacrificed?

People say that one will succeed and ten thousand bones will wither, and a monument will also be ten thousand bones withered.

The wordless stele is engraved with eight dragons, the movement and stillness are appropriate, the scales are distinct, and they are scattered and entangled. On both sides of the stele there are Shenglong line carvings. The stele pedestal is on the sunny side, the line engraves the lion and horse fighting picture, the horse with the hooves bowed to the head, the lion and the horse with the head held high, the lion and the horse, the family emblem commonly used in Europe.

Ouyang Anna held her two-month-old daughter in her arms, carefully examined this great stone monument that sang praises to a woman, and seemed to touch the body temperature of a great woman. Sunlight shone on the smooth surface of the slate, revealing the glittering text......

There are no words on the stele!

Wu Zetian's book of heaven hidden in the wordless tablet? Only open to the little girl named Nine Colors? The daughter held out her little hand and instructed her mother to take a look. Anna struggled to stand on her tiptoes, and finally read one of the lines -

Wang Xiaoer came here for a visit

The words were written crookedly, and at first glance, she hadn't read a book for a few years, and Ouyang Anna smiled dumbly. There were words on the wordless tablet, but it was not written by the Tang Dynasty, but the literati and painters and peddlers of later generations came to brush the sense of existence, and wanted to engrave their names on the monument of Wu Zetian.

Qi Yuanshan said that the sappers had already selected the site of the barracks, which was just one mile south of Qianling, next to Nitou Mountain. Anna glanced at the tomb of Qianling, the majestic stone mountain, all over the cypress on the Qingqing Tomb, the white clouds floated to the top of the mountain, as if wearing a white hat, Su Dongpo once used "the clear clouds on the ridge to describe the hat".

She followed her husband back to the camp, where the sappers had measured the approximate range. Originally, it was a wilderness with dry grass and rocks, with Qianling in the north and open wheat fields in the south.