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New
Archaeological Find in Nanjing
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????Chinese archaeologists
recently found a brick-and-stone moat and an underground passage
outside the eastern wall surrounding the famous Xiaoling, the
mausoleum of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644),
Zhu Yuanzhang.
????The moat is about 200 meters long and is
as much as eight meters wide in the widest part. Built with titanic
bars of stone, the moat impressed the archaeologists.
????The underground passage, 1.5 meters high,
is believed to be older than the walls of the mausoleum which
was first built in 1381.
????Archaeologists also discovered quite a few
yellow-colored building parts like tiles that are made of colored
glaze. Those parts, even greater in number than the total of previously
found, shown that the mausoleum palace was once covered with tiles.
????The discovery of the moat further proves
that the building of mausoleums for the afterlife of emperors
had imitated the structure of palaces for the living, experts
said.
????(People's Daily 03/05/2001)
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