From the Vault: Jade Immortality

I believe we touched on this a little bit in uh a later episode that you and I did, oh, the one about the tomb of Chin Chi Huang. Yeah, we at least touched on it as as part of the history of of Chinese funeral traditions. Well, we hope you enjoyed this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager.

We have kind of like a unofficial series of episodes that we've been doing over the course of the last two years that are related to various Asian cultures and death, and this is another one of those. So we've talked about ghost burial before, we've talked about Chinese immortality. Uh. And then this is also slightly connected to the episode that we did on or maybe it was two episodes on mummification. Yeah, I feel like we've done two, maybe more.

I know that we've talked about exploring more and more of the mummification cultures throughout the world. I know what it is. We we discussed Japanese custom in an episode. Yeah. Oh, and then there's also the monks. They have the self mummifying monks. Yes, those guys. That's the other one. So this is a long those lines. Today we're gonna be talking about jade burial suits. And once I got done researching this, my first thought was this would be a

far cooler way to make a new Mummy franchise. They've been showing the trailers constantly for that New Mummy movie with Tom Cruise that's coming out this summer, and it looks awful, and I think that this would be a cool mummy like this mummy in this giant suit of jade armor coming at you. That would be so much fun. Yeah, because you look at the images of this, and there should be an image of one of these suits of jade burial armor on the landing page for this episode.

It's stuffitable your mind dot com. It's uh, it looks kind of like the villain in that first Thor movie, you know, that big suit of animate armor that he fought destroyer. Yeah, it looks kind of like the Destroyer. It's it's beautiful, and indeed, I could see an Eastern Mummy franchise really having some fun with this. Yeah. That being said, I did not see the Eastern Mummy entrigue like like the third or fourth Mummy film that came out. Oh did they do something like that or did Oh?

I didn't know. I don't know what I having not seen it, I can't speak for the mummy design. However, I know there's a scene where yet he's attacks, so I do kind of want to watch it for that, Huh. I had no idea that even existed. This is like from the nineteen nineties Mummy franchise with a Scorpion King and all that. Yeah, this one was post Scorpion King and that's about all I know about. Okay, Well, maybe we'll talk about that one on trailer Talk when we

do a Facebook live about these episodes this week. So in this episode, we're going we're going to be exploring a practice that that is tied directly to the Western Han dynasty, and we're gonna, I know a lot of you out there are not going to have a real firm handle on dynastic Chinese history. Don't worry. We're going to root all that where it needs to be placed in the in the timeline shortly. But these suits are you know, we can call them jade suits, we can

call them jade armor. In the in manned in they're sometimes referred to as you shaw, which are jade caskets, or sometimes u y which are jade garments. And it is essentially a stone garment if you think about that, because because jade is a stone, and that's probably a great place to start. Really, let's just discuss what jade is before we pile on it's supernatural connotations and then get into Chinese history. Alright, So jade is essentially an

ornamental green rock. Everyone has probably seen something that he's either made of jade or is supposed to be made of jade. But then what does that even mean, Yeah, I'm thinking of like in the local mall that we have here, there's like a couple like places where you can buy sort of like Chinese themed aesthetic decorations for the home, and usually there's like a piece of jade in it somewhere, or it might be made of some

kind of fake jade. There's those um I forget what they're called, but they have they're like red uh ribbons or um threads and they've got a piece of jade woven into them. Oh yeah. You often see little little rings of jade, sometimes sometimes worn by by children in China still or incorporated into some sort of direct decoration

or or personal adornment. And uh. The interesting thing here though, is that whatever you're calling jade jade is the name given to two distinct minerals uh neph right and jaded, and in their purest form, either of these is white uh in. In Chinese, it's referred to as mutton fat jade. And you also have minerals such as iron and chromium that give jade it's mini hughes. So there's not just one color of jade. It's not like a crayola. This

is jade. Pulled it up to your stone and see if it matches between white and like very green, yeah, very in darker greens. Yeah. So let's talk about these two varieties real quick. Uh. The nef right is sometimes referred to as true jade. It's very strong, it has

a more vivid green coloration. And this is the stuff that the Chinese worked with during the Han dynasty, which is what we're gonna be talking about today, because jadeit wasn't introduced to China until the late sixteen hundreds via Burma. So when we're talking about these pieces of jade armor, they're made using nef right, not jadeite. Now. Jadeite, on the other hand, is more fragile, and it has a

brilliant gleaming surface when polished. Now jade is usually found inside pebbles or boulders, where like the rough stony exterior doesn't really give a clue as to what's in there. Jade itself, it can't be chipped or flaked, so it has to be worn down using a rough paste and a combination of rotary discs, grinders, and tools. And during

the Han dynasty this was probably made. This paste was made with water grease, and sand and then iron tools had been developed specifically for the art and craft of working with jade to develop and work it further into various forms. Um So, I think this is a good point for me to just bring up, Like I think here in the West, Jade is sort of this very like stereotypical attached idea to uh like the orient right,

It's very bound up in orientalism. Yeah. Like, do you remember that video game came out gosh, must have been ten fifteen years ago now, Jade Empire. I played the hell out of that game. Oh was this that was just a term based RPG. Yeah, it was made by the same people who made the Knights of the Old Republic games and the Dragon Age games. Very similar setup except for this was in It had a really cool setting.

But it was like a steampunk mythological China um and you know, as such used very like kind of stereotypical pieces from that mythology. But still, I mean, I have to admit, as much as I love exploring uh Asian history, I also love fantasy inspired by Asian So yeah, uh so I should I should check it out a little bit. I don't know. It's one of those where the graphics don't really hold up. I mean, I haven't played it in so long. I think it was I played it

on the original Xbox. But it was fun. You got

like this various group of characters. You would have I think like three characters at a time that would go on these like sort of dungeon crawl missions and like one would be a spell It was very D and D but it was like we've talked about this on the show before, the sort of like racist Oriental Adventures D and D where they would like, you know, you'd have a spell caster, you'd have a warrior, and you'd have like a ninja or something like that, and they

would like go there. It was really just like a fighter rogue and a magic user um and yeah, they'd have these various missions. They'd fight monsters from Chinese mythology. Yeah, it was fun aesthetically. So there was probably a little jade in there, and oh yeah, yeah, I think that the jade was a big theme in it. Yeah, well, jade is is a big theme in uh in Chinese traditions, So we should probably discuss what it's supernatural powers were thought to be. We've we've given a brief overview of

its physical properties. Certainly you can go in deeper if you want to. We're not really a minerals podcast, but there's a lot of great information out there about jade if that's your thing. As as far as supernatural qualities go, yeah, jade was believed to have protective and preservative qualities, warding off both decay and evil spirits. I've also read that some believe jade darkens as the where gets richer, likenses ticket poorer. So it's kind of like a mood ring

for your you know, your your financial status. That's great. Instead of having like an app on your phone that tells you how your bank accounts doing, you just have like a little piece of jade, like like on one of those red wristbands. Yeah, you meet somebody, you want to know where they stand, you just take a peek

of their jade. Now. It's also worth pointing out that in terms of just how important jade is in Chinese tradition and mythology, you have u d the Jade Emperor, and he stands as the supreme god in the Chinese mythological pantheon. And if you if you actually think back to the episode on the Chinese zodiac that stuff to blow your mind did a while back. Uh, there's this whole parable of the swimming zodiac animals in a race, and they're racing for U D. Have you seen any

of those who movies about Dr D. I haven't. I'm familiar with him by name, but I haven't watched their fun You should check him out now. It's also important to note that Dallas alchemists as well put put an emphasis on jade as part of an immortality elixir that also contained gold, silver, arsenic, and other ores, and it was said to provide resistance to aging and decay. In fact, in the three twenty book Po Po which means the Master Embracing Simplicity, author Gee Hong wrote that gold and

jade inserted into the nine orifices prevented corpses from decaying. Okay, so this comes up a lot today when we're talking about this jade burial armor. And I wanna establish something here. So I read this and I went, I had to count my orifices, and I was like, I kept coming up short. I only counted seven, and then I realized they were counting the eyes. Yes, And it might sound kind of grotesque. To think of eye plugs, but they're not like corks the ice, more like their little shields.

It's kind of like when cucumbers on the eye. Yeah, the one I was going for was how they would put coins on people's eyes that they could pay the ferryman for the river Sharon. But yeah, this is obviously different mythology, but it's the same principle. It's like little jade shields that went over your eyes. So apparently I don't know if I'm wrong or right, but I never thought of my eyes as being orifice. Is well, it's it's where the light comes in, right, true, something's going

in there now. It's interesting I mentioned children wearing jade bengals earlier and you you still see this used in China. And this is the idea here is that this protects the child from harm, including soul separating fright by a demon. And uh, I actually ran across the cool source for this. So if we if we ever want to do an episode on Chinese exorcism, uh, playing off our past episodes on exorcism, this would be a good one to seek out. I think that's hard, yes from me, but audience, let

us know if you're interested in Chinese exorcism. Now in terms of other associations, some traditional Chinese medicine approaches call for the use of jade massaging tools to help I was reading about using it on wrinkles on the face. And they are also ingredients with jade in the name in Chinese traditional medicine. They're not shy jade, such as a jade windscreen powder that's just a dried root of of a particular plant, but it has nothing to do

with the mineral itself. So even though like we're well past this sort of you know, myth that jade has this ability to stave off the k it's still used in a lot of those sort of I guess homeopathic methodologies.

Like I was reading about the one of the ones, uh, the ancient Chinese jade stone being used, like I think they would like wrap it around your neck and it was supposed to help you with T M J H. Yeah, I mean it's I mean ultimately comes down to the idea that here is this very beautiful, cool looking stone that came out of the ground. Surely it's worth keeping around for something, right. Yeah, it reminds me of hematite.

There's there's similar stuff surrounding hematite. Yeah, but just I think in different cultures, and you know a lot of this bleeds into into other cultures outside of China. I know, if you if you happen to visit a Korean sauna, and we have one of these in the Atlanta Era and j June um and and I love going there. They have these various saunas that sauna rooms that have different minerals there, and they have one that has jade in it. And the idea here is that quote jade

increases metabolism, improve circulation, and relieves arthritis pain. All right, now, this is giving me an idea for a business, and I'm not very entrepreneurial, so maybe somebody out there can start this. So you combine the jade sauna idea with the floatation sensory deprivation tank, and you build a sensory deprivation tank out of jade, and then you climb inside that and you float in salinated water for an hour.

That would be amazing because that's what that's something that's kind of lacking with with float tank scenarios is they are very they're very secular. Yeah, they could use a little um mystical spicing. Yeah, yeah, that would be fun. I'd do it. Yeah, plug plug our orifices with us, give me nine pieces of jade. All right, Well, before we get those nine pieces of jade, why don't we take a quick break, and when we get back, we're gonna give you a little bit of a rundown on

the Western Han dynasty. Alright, we're back. So I realized Chinese dynastics secession can be confusing for folks. Uh and and certainly especially if you're just going from zero trying to go to from zero to fifty on it. It's it's a lot to take. I will admit. I mean, as some listeners know, I spent time in China as a kid. I learned Mandarin growing up, and I lived in Singapore during high school, and Chinese history is completely lost on me. It's really tough for me to keep

track of it. Yeah, I I'm constantly referring back to the chart with the with the dynasty's. Now. I know there's a little song I've heard people sing this where it's Fred Fred Jacka, except it's it's the different dynasties. I have not heard that, Okay, I when I say I've heard it, I've I've seen a video with two old white Chinese scholars singing it to each other as an example of something you learn in school when you're learning about Chinese sisters. All right, so it's like a

new modic device. Yeah, okay, so we're not gonna throw it all at you. Basically, we're gonna go from the beginning up until the Han dynasty just and throughout the years, so you can place it in the general time frame. And uh, the Han dynasty is essentially the fourth or fifth dynasty or the second Imperial Dynasty. It ultimately depends on what you count as a dynasty. Uh. And and this has to do with sort of a legendary mythic time. So let's start from the beginning. First, up, you have

the Shod dynasty. This is to six b C. And it's largely mythological, with some very early Bronze Age evidence. So yeah, this is the time of gods and heroes and so. And this is why some don't actually count this in terms of historical dynasties. But then comes the Shan dynasty, and this was long considered apocryphal, but his historians now correlated with oracle Bone writings. This period takes us up to roughly even twenty three b C. And the Joe dynasty. Now this is the first millennium BC,

and this is a time of conflict in China. And there are two periods here that are a particular note, and that's the Spring and Autumn from seven eighty one b C and the Warring States period four through to b C. Okay, So what I'm seeing here so far is it seems like these dynasties lasts you know, roughly

around five years. Yeah, yeah, so so far. Now, at the end of the Warring States period, the Chin Dynasty begins, and this is when the Chin Kingdom conquered other central Chinese states and became the first truly imperial dynasty under

Chin cha Hung, the first Emperor of China. And it was during this rule that the Northern Border Wall was implemented, what we now call the Great Wall, and in the first of many peasant uprisings to to echo through Chinese history, Lubang rose up and conquered China to found finally the Han dynasty and two oh six b c E. And this was only you know, fifteen years later, Okay. So this this is where we're zoning in on in terms of this jade burial armor being created, right, But there's

obviously many dynasties afterwards. So yeah, the Han dynasty is is big money early on like this is uh, this is again a time of things coming together, of unity. Certainly there's still lots of lingering problems as with any imperial scenario, but but it's it's a time where, uh, where there's a there's enough there are enough riches out there, there's enough specialization that you can have something like a

fancy funeral tradition take place. Now, overall, the Han dynasty run ran from two o two or two oh six b C until two one CE, so you were talking about a pretty long stretch here, uh, and that at the end of this in to C that's when everything splits into the three kingdoms. But we divided the Han dynasty up into the first the former or Western Han dynasty, and the and also the later or Eastern Han dynasty.

And that's because in the midst of this uh, this long you know, four century stretch, you have a rebellion take place, and so and basically what happens is Han dynasty official Wang Mang sees his power and UH and and this is referred to as the Shin dynasty nine through D. He does a pretty poor job. And then the hans A reclaimed power in twenty a d after besieging the Imperial Palace. He dies in the process. So in other words, you have to four hundred years of

of Han rule. But there's this one little period where a usurper, like a twenty period or actually less than twenty years of this one guy ruling and they just getting taken down. So again, this is an influential four centuries in Chinese history saw the institution of Confucian norms, the roots of the imperial examination system, UH, the an age of great economic, technological, cultural, and social progress. Hans

still refers to the main Chinese ethnic group. And this is again also the period that gives us these these amazing jade burial suits. Okay, so we've teased enough. What's a jade burial suit? Because I think when I first heard about this, my thought was that it was like Iron Man, and it was, but iron Man made of jade, and that's not correct. There's thousands of little pieces and

these things. Yeah, it's between two thousand and four thousand of these little jade pieces, all of its sewn together, and it's sewn together depending on your station, it might be gold, silver, or silk. So really the suit described option is probably better. This is a a suit made for a corpse, and it's a suit made of maybe you know, mostly stone, and maybe gold and silver or silk as well. I can't imagine that a living person could wear one of these and and move. It would

be incredibly heavy. Yeah, only a supernatural um, you know, undead being in Hollywood movie could do it. Now, we referred back to our episode on ghost burial earlier, and and I do want to touch on on that real quick because one of a couple of the ideas we discussed in there are central to understanding why this much care was was taken, uh, you know for a dead individual.

So we we discussed the importance of siao the filial pity and Chinese tradition is rooted in Dallas to philosophy Confucian family values, and it concerns the undying nature of the human soul. You know, the dead live on in

the afterlife. Uh. And then they're also tied to this Chinese no of of of structural completeness, right, that you have this this basic unity of the family and if everything, if anything, is out of out of place there, it's going to cause disharmony in your life and potentially in the afterlife. Yeah, we went into far greater detail on this in the Ghost Burial episode, but I wanted to reference a USA Today article that was specifically about the jade burial suits and how it referred to this to

for Western readers. So it claims that tombs in general were thought to be portals between the living and the dead. And basically the concept was, and this is similar to what we went over in Ghost Burial, the soul was divided. There's one part of the soul that goes to heaven, the other part stays in the body, and the one that's in the body had to be appeased or else it would turn evil, while the one that goes to heaven acted on behalf of the loved ones by offering

them either protection or good fortune. And this is why the living tried to ensure that the deceased were well provided for in death. So you get very similar death rituals to the Egyptians in that like people are buried with their things, with things that they think will keep

them comfortable. Yeah, there's this this this mix though with the the ancestor of veneration that it's not only is this somebody that deserved a proper burial and deserves to be you know, buried and with the things that they loved. This is also someone who can speak on your behalf in the afterlife, Like, this is an important contact to have. So you want them to be happy, You want to do right by them. So the very first one of these suits, which is part of that, was documented in

literature around a d three twenty. But that's documented in literature. We didn't find them until far afterward. Yeah, it wasn't until nineteen fifty eight that the suit hypothesis here that that these little jade pieces we were we were finding were part of the jade suit. You know, it was

just a theory at the time. And uh, it wasn't until we actually found a really undisturbed tomb nine in nine, two tombs and heavy and this is where we found tombs undisturbed by looters or mining efforts, and it resulted in two complete, recovered and restored suits of jade armor.

And this is quite a story. And if you've you know, well, we're going to talk about this, but museums here in the United States have had these suits one or the other brought around on tour basically, right, And so it's possible that you've actually seen one of these sort of restructured and put on display in a museum here in

the West. But uh, that's weird to me. I'll talk about it more later after we get through it, but I think it's a little it's it seems slightly offensive to me, especially given the nature of why it was built in the first place. Now you mentioned restored, and that's key because if you see one of these new museum on display, it is almost assuredly been restored because despite the ideas tied up with jade, jade doesn't or at least the jade suit is it was executed, does

not actually preserve the body. So the body ends up rotting away, there's nothing left but bone. The suit collapses, and then sometimes the casket collapses as well on top of it, so everything has to be put back together. Now you actually have seen one, right, Uh, yeah, I think I've seen a couple, but the one that I got to see in China is the one that impressed me the most. It was at the Museum of the Western Han Dynasty, Mausoleum of the Nanyu King and Guang Show.

So I was there with my wife, my my my newly acquired son. He was not impressed at all as I strolled him around in the stroke how old was he? Though he was like two or three, he was like he was one and a half. He was not having any of it. But but the tomb was. It was really impressive for me anyway. Uh. It was a hidden twenty meters sixty five point six ft underground and the king himself was covered with with a with a silk and two thousand two pieces of jade to compose his suit.

And the whole tomb really had the feel of just a cosmic vessel, and that this was the suit of a of a necronot, you know. Uh yeah, but very much in keeping with with the feeling that I get from from any kind of Egyptian artifacts. Now a number of other such jade suits accompanied by hordes of silks, lacquer ware, figurines, and bronzes. You'll find these displayed in

many Chinese museums. H they turn up as you pointed out, in an international Collections and Traveling Exhibits and three count from the Institute of Archaeology and Beijing claimed ten thousand Han tombs had been discovered, and this resulted in twenty tombs with twenty three jade suit remain. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and then when we come back, we'll jump right back into it. All right, we're back.

So one of the things that I was reading was that at the time that these were being made, and this goes along with our episode on Egyptian mummification. I mean, this was a process. It wasn't just like they had Jade's suits ready to go right. Um. These suits would have taken the most skilled of jade smith's over ten years to make. So they were either building them before the person died, or the person died, they were probably embalmed in some way, and then the suit was built

around them ten years after they had passed away. Now, as should be obvious from that ten thousand tombs, twenty three Jade's suit remains a figure there. These were not for everybody. These were specifically for members of the Han aristocracy, because ultimately, who else is going to afford a low luxury burial item like this, UH, the the work John Show or the Book of the Later Han. The Chinese court document from this time explained that your your rank

determined what sort of jade's suit you were well suited for. Uh. Emperors had gold threaded jade suits, vassal king's high ranking imperial concubines and princesses had jade suits with silver thread, and dowager concupines and sisters of the emperor lesser aristocrats had suits with copper thread. I wouldn't be offended to wear a copper one, No I would. I would. I'd be happy with with with copper or if anybody needs a dowager concubine call me now. Sometimes there were added decorations.

Emperor Woo's suit was decorated with imagery of the flood dragon and other sacred creatures, and this is referred to as the flood Dragon jade suit. But a lot of them are going to be, you know, featureless polished jade. Yeah. One thing to remember here too, is like we're thrown down in terms of gold and silver and copper, is that jade was more valuable in China than gold or

silver was in the West and jade crafting. As we mentioned earlier, it achieved its height during the reign of Emperor Chien long Uh, and that was from seventeen thirty six to seventeen CE. He actually made all jade in the country his private property, and the idea was that if anybody tried to trade jade, it was punishable by death because he he owned it all, regardless of whether

or not it was actually in his possession. Now this ties in nicely with the next point, and that's that evidence supports the theory that this was a There was probably a centralized place or a couple of places for manufacturing these suits. Um artisans would work on what was again essentially a luxury item, So you can't just go anywhere and get a jade suit and um. And while these still couldn't today, yeah, I mean unless unless you

know a guy UM. It's also worth noting that while these items were for specific members of Han aristocracy, there were violations, including an account and this was shared in a in a paper that will will sign on the

landing page by Jeffrey Cow and Yang Joe Shing. And this was the tale of a eunuch named Joo Jong who secretly buried his father in a jade suit, but then he was found out and so the casket was opened up uh and um and busted out, and his entire family was imprisoned for the for the for the crime.

Think about that, I mean, like, given how difficult these things are to make, Like somehow you secretly had one of those, made you bury your dad in it, and then you're found out and caught and just like utterly punished for it. That's that's that's story, Yeah, I mean, and it shows how how how important all of this was to the culture at the time. You know, this was this was not just you couldn't just be frivolous

and get a jade suit. No, the jade suit was for particular members of society, and to violate uh those

those societal divisions was was a dire matter. Now, we mentioned earlier how in the in the late nineteen fifties you had this hypothesis these little jade pieces everyone was finding were we're bits of a jade suit, but that it wasn't until ninety eight when they found those two tombs and heavy this is when we actually had evidence, we actually had too complete recovered and ultimately restored suits of jade armor and uh in particular, they were lushing

printaging of the Kingdom of jeong Shan. So this was the son of the Western Han Emperor Jing and his consort dal Juan. Now, while their bodies were undisturbed, the corpses had collapsed, the casket had collapsed, but everything was still in place. He had gold thread, she had silk.

His suit contained two thousand four jade pieces, hers contained at two thousand, one hundred sixty And in both suits the only the outer surfaces were polished and the inner surfaces were scarred by circular cutting tools and straight edge tools, the very tools that you referred to earlier for the

shaping of jade. Yeah. And while the jade you know, didn't protect their bodies from decomposition as was thought, the porous rock that was actually in this this I guess cave is the best way to describe it, did have absorbed a capabilities. When they were found in nineteen archaeologists had to work through get this two brick walls and a thick plate of molten iron that had been poured between them. And this is obviously because of how bad the grave robbing thing had become and and partially why

this one was hadn't been robbed yet, you know. Uh, so they had to work their way through this. Lu Sheng's body had those jade plugs that we talked about earlier. He had him in his nose, ears, and mouth, and then the little jade shields for his eyes. They also each had guilt bronze headrests that were inlaid with jade,

and they held jade crescents in their hand. Now, the coffin that was found on the floor that was made of four thousand pieces of jade, and it had just completely fallen apart into a pile on the Tumbe floor. There were also lots of sculptures, as we mentioned earlier. They they they've placed lots of little items around too that were also made of jade, including those of a bixie, which was a mythological powerful winged beast that averted evil. And I included a picture in here. It's kind of

it's kind of like a dragon. It's like a cross between like a dragon and a dog with it's got wings. Yeah, I keep wanting to do like a full exploration as if such a thing were possible. Of of Chinese dragons because there's so many different varieties and there are a lot of things where you look at them and you think, oh, well that's a dragon or that's kind of a dragon turtle.

But they all have very particular identities and symbol and symbolic power like you would and it would depend where you would want to engrave one or include a statue of one. You would protect certain certain structures. You know. I think I pronounced that opinion wrong too, because I just went with Bixie because it looks like it rhymes with pixie. But I think it's supposed to be be she Okay, So I look at it looks like a Bixie when I can imagine his name m Pixie. I Hey,

there's the Pokemon of their time. I mean, this thing looks pretty cool. It's it's kind of like a fat chested wagon dog. Indeed, now, obviously, when we when we look at the jade burial suits, we're looking at the convergence of two different customs, burial in armor and the

sacred use of jade. So there are plenty of examples of of of just normal decorative armor suits that were worn by bodies prior to this, and the actually the prince that we just referred to, I believe he was buried with a suit of armor, and the suit of armor was actually of more modern design, but he was that that was just included with him, and he was

actually buried, of course, in the jade armor. Now my understanding is these two in particular that we're referring to, these are the ones that are touring around the world and you can see them in various museum locations. Yes, I believe so. All right, so you're probably wondering, well, then, what happens to the jade suit. It's like, this is a pretty fantastic tradition. Why does it fade away? Why does something so rich and so ornate just vanish? And

the answer is interesting the answering. The answer has to do with all of those plundered tombs. Yeah, it's all about grave robbing. Yeah, and this was fascinating and disturbing as well when we read what the the the the the tomb raiders would do with the suits when they pilfered them. Yeah, there were more than two dozen suits

that have been discovered since. But the reason why there aren't more is because in a D two D and twenty three Emperor when of Way ordered that the production of them had to be stopped because of so much looting. And what would happen is these looters would go in and they would burn the suits solely so they could retrieve the gold thread that was within. They didn't care

about the jade. And as you pointed out off air, well, if you had these little pieces of jade that were perfectly cut down to make a suit, you can't go sell that on the black market because somebody is going to know, oh, this must have come from the specific suit, from the specific prints. But gold you can melt down and turn in whatever you once, so you can always

come up with a story about that gold. But those jade pieces were clearly stolen from an important person's body, and you might as well just walk around with a sign and mandarin that says execute me now. You you refer back earlier to the poorest nature of the jade.

And there is this this idea that is put out there that even though jade does not have any magical body preserving properties, and you know, despite the fact that no soft tissue has been been found preserved by these funeral rights, it has been suggested that this the poorest nature of the stone itself might actually preserve some genetic material, and that you know, d NA might be found intermixed

with the jade. A lot of accounts of this notion refer back to a piece of title Immortal Jade by Sherry Uh to Lynco and this is published in the Canadian Medical Journal. But to my knowledge, there's been no actual evidence for this thus far. Okay, but I could see why it would be an interesting avenue of research, Like, there's some possibilities for genealogical research, especially you know, you mentioned the Han ethnic group earlier. Related to that, that

could be some interesting stuff if you're looking at DNA samples. Yeah. I think one of the problems there is that is that that we do have Uh tombs and graves from the Han dynasty that we're able to study and and get genetic information from. So it's not like these would

be the one place we would find it. Yeah, and this so this leads into my I know I mentioned this earlier, but it's just it seems really weirdly offensive that these relics are kind of pulled out of where they were kept, trotted out across the world and displayed in museums. I remember the High Museum here in Atlanta had the Terracotta warriors a couple of years ago, and

they were very cool. But the so my understanding was those terracotta warriors were buried with, you know, on one very much like these jade suits were, and I felt similar then. I don't know. I suppose if they didn't do this, the tombs would eventually be looted by somebody. But to me, I guess the idea more along the lines of what you saw when you were in China is you go to the actual site itself and you see them that is at least like sort of compromising.

You're allowing them to keep these suits that they uh that they believed we're going to protect them in the afterlife. Yeah, I mean, I guess this gets into a more complicated issue and and and it's gonna vary, you know, from culture to culture, and depending how far back in time you're going, Because I it was instantly makes me think back to when I was at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Instantly we went up there for C. Two e two and Joe and I went over there, and they have a wonderful Native American section a lot of it devoted to Northwest Coast Native people's and uh, you know, they have masks, they have costumes, details about their various you know, rich um spiritual traditions. But there's a section that they've completely um marked off. You can't see into it anymore

because the display depicts uh, important artifacts from their funeral rights. Okay, yeah, okay, So somewhere along the line, like maybe that tribe and its current iteration said we're uncomfortable with us, please don't do it. Yeah, so it's like a current people saying this is we find this to be disrespectful. This needs

to be handled in a more appropriate manner. I'd be curious if there's if there's anyone in China who feels that way about this stuff, or if it's just kind of like they've moved past that uh veneration for this particular dynasty and they're okay with you know, sending them around the world and having them looked at because I guess in a way it spreads Chinese culture. Yeah, yeah, it's curious. Well, if you're a listener out there and you have any idea, maybe you've lived in China or

your Chinese yourself please let us know. I'd be curious indeed. So so there you have it. Hopefully we've provided decent snapshot of another just really interesting funeral tradition. Uh A an artistic tradition, a time period, a little about the mineral and the possibility of some sort of genetic material actually being preserved by this, uh this supernaturally infused a

funeral rite. Now, I guess some people are probably thinking that I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I started off the episode saying I would love to see a movie about a jade burial suited mummy, but at the same time I kind of am uncomfortable about actually looking at the real thing. So, you know, I'd be curious if you If you've got any information about this that we missed, please let us know. You can reach out to us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram.

If you've seen these before and you've got details that you want to let us know about, please tell us that too, or maybe even some pictures that would be cool. Uh do you wear jade? If you wear ja, lets share any kind of you know, supernatural ideas that you carry around with it, and then you can always visit our website, which is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

That's right, that's where you'll find uh. All the podcasts, including several of these we've mentioned, the Chinese immortality, the ghost marriage, the various mummification episodes, the Chinese zodiac, all of those are there, and we'll trying to include links on the landing page for this episode. And if you just want to write us the old fashioned way, whether it's in English or Mandarin, you can write us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for

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