Boat coffin burial is an ancient burial custom distributed in the southern region of China.

The basic feature is that the body of the deceased is placed in a coffin shaped like a ship and then buried.

The way to bury the coffin is to hang it in a cave, to put it on a tree, or to bury it in the earth.

In Chen Han's hometown of Fujian Province, there are many ship coffins hanging from caves.

In his memory, when he was a child, when he passed by on a relatively remote and mountain-backed road, he saw artificially dug caves on the surrounding mountain walls, and some wooden coffins were placed in them.

Later, these hanging burials were gradually properly transferred by the local archaeological department and re-buried.

The earliest ship coffins found so far are the two coffins taken from the Guanyin Rock and Baiyan in Wuyi Mountain, both of which are made of intact Nanmu, which is basically the same as the shape of the fishing boats used in southern Fujian and other places.

According to carbon determination, the production time of the two coffins is more than 3,500 years ago, about the Xia and Shang eras, and some people estimate that they were in the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

However, most of the burials in Fujian are suspended in the air, and caves are dug on the cliffs or mountain walls for burial.

Most of the coffins used as burial tools were unearthed in Sichuan.

The boat is also in the shape of a canoe, but the earliest is no older than the middle of the Warring States period, about 2,500 years ago.

However, why did the ancients use boats as coffins? How did this custom come about? What are the ideas that reside in this practice? Why did the ancients use ships as coffins?

To this day, this remains a mystery.

The most famous boat coffin burial in Shu is the Ba people's boat coffin.

In 1954, many bronze artifacts were found when the Chongqing No. 1 Mechanism Brick and Tile Factory was building a factory and digging the foundation. As a result, the Southwest Museum came here to carry out large-scale archaeological excavations and unearthed a large number of tombs from the Warring States period.

Among these various tombs, only the Ba people ship coffin is unique.

Seventeen tombs are arranged quite neatly and densely, with their heads facing the Yangtze River.

The grave pits are all earthen pits that can only accommodate the size of a boat, and the burial tools are about 5 meters long, and the diameter is about 1 meter or more.

The upper part is about a semi-circular shape, the bottom is slightly flattened, the bottom of both ends is obliquely sharpened, so that it is warped into a boat shape, and a large hole is chiseled at each end of the head and tail for burial.

The shape of the boat can be divided into two kinds, one is a simpler canoe, and the other is a small coffin built-in, like an inner coffin and an outer coffin, and the other end forms a foot compartment.

The use of the Ba people's boat coffin shows that the Ba people are a tribe that lives near the water and is familiar with the nature of the water, they build ships and sails, drive boats to fish, or engage in water battles, and are buried in similar boat coffins after death.

This is of great significance to the study of life, funeral and other customs in Chengdu and even Sichuan at that time.

The Ba people, in fact, are the minority regimes that emerged in Shu after the Sanxingdui civilization.

At that time, there was a Ba people and a Shu people, both of which were called Bashu.

Later, Shu and Ba were successively annexed by Qin, and the rich Sichuan Basin became the granary of Qin, which gave Qin the capital to unify the six countries.

According to the current archaeological findings, the ship coffin burial first existed in the Western Zhou Dynasty.

Since the 50s of the last century, the Three Gorges and eastern Sichuan have repeatedly unearthed ship coffins, which are the territory of the Pakistani country in the pre-Qin period, and the ship coffins were once considered to be the unique burial methods of the Ba people.

However, with the gradual deepening of archaeology, the excavation of the ship coffin in Chengdu Commercial Street in 2000 shows that the Shu people also used the boat coffin for burial.

At that time, experts generally believed that the specific time when the Shu people used ship coffins for burial was in the Warring States Period, not earlier than the Warring States Period.

In other words, the ship burial culture should have appeared after the Western Zhou Dynasty.

Then, this speculation was disproved again.

The Jinsha site, which has been sleeping for more than 3,000 years, "woke up and shocked the world", and the most shocking thing was not the tens of thousands of ivory unearthed, exquisite gold, jade, and bronze wares.

Instead, in the burial area of the Jinsha site, the ship coffin burial was found again.

The appearance of boat coffins in the burial area of Jinsha site proves that boat coffins were used in Chengdu as early as the middle of the Western Zhou Dynasty.

This advances the "birth time" of the coffin of the Shu people by a full 500 years!

It even surpassed the Ba people, indicating that the boat coffin burial actually originated from the Shu people at the earliest!

The discovery and excavation of Sanxingdui and Jinsha ruins have gradually made the development of the ancient Shu Kingdom clear.

How similar are the two sites?

Jinsha site and Sanxingdui site are in the same vein in the sacrificial culture, and have developed.

The style and artistic style of the artifacts unearthed from the two sites are very similar, and the unearthed artifacts reflect that the ancient Shu people of Sanxingdui and the ancient Shu people of Jinsha have common beliefs and worships, such as the worship of big trees, and the worship of the sun.

A large number of artifacts highly similar to Sanxingdui have been unearthed at the Jinsha site!

The two ruins are not far from each other, in the religious beliefs, the layout of the city site and the continuation of time, it can be seen that the Jinsha site is the inheritance and development of Sanxingdui culture, it is another political, cultural and economic center of the ancient Shu Kingdom after Sanxingdui, and it is the beginning of Chengdu city!

It will advance the history of the founding of Chengdu to about 3,000 years ago!

When the Jinsha site developed to the later stage, the transfer of its cultural center to today's Chengdu city center was to accumulate and create the urban history of Chengdu.

It can be said that the ancient Shu civilization represented by Sanxingdui and Jinsha ruins gave birth to Chengdu's urban culture.

Now it can be basically confirmed that the Sichuan area passed through the earliest prehistoric ancient city sites in the Chengdu Plain, and then went to the Sanxingdui site, to the Jinsha site, and then to the last Warring States ship coffin tomb!

These four cultures together construct four different stages of the development and evolution of the ancient Shu civilization!

From the early prehistoric tribes, to the earliest Sanxingdui civilization in the same period as the Xia and Shang periods, and then to the pre-Qin period, across the Jinsha site from the end of the Shang to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and finally to the Ba and Shu states during the Warring States Period, and then annexed by the Qin State.

Relying on this inconspicuous "boat coffin burial", it has smoothed out the continuity of Shu culture!

It is worth mentioning that due to the age, in fact, there is no physical coffin left in the burial area of Jinsha site, but through the wooden remains of the boat, they can still conclude that the coffin was a common funeral instrument at that time.

The so-called "boat-shaped wooden ruins" are a section of soil that is darker in color and shows "elongated" traces.

The shape and appearance are almost exactly the same as the appearance found in the Sanxingdui site in Moon Bay.

It is called a "wooden boat", but in fact there is only a pile of dirt left, but the wood has rotted and turned into dirt, which is darker than the color of the surrounding soil.

Moon Bay can issue a tomb form that is suspected to be a ship coffin, which is definitely a big discovery.

Of course, according to the depth of this exploration, there is a high probability that these ship coffins are not from the Sanxingdui civilization period, but from a later period, perhaps the Western Zhou Dynasty, or the Warring States Period.

However, in the range of Sanxingdui civilization, the discovery of ship coffins is still of great significance.

Next, as long as we figure out the age of these ship coffins, it is very meaningful to study the different stages of the development and evolution of the ancient Shu civilization!