The Lianyungang Museum

By staff reporter ZHANG XUEYING

Restored pictures of Ling Huiping, the 2,000 years old woman, when she was 16, 25 and 42 years old (From left).

The Lianyungang Museum, in Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province, used to be an undiscovered treasure trove of cultural relics. Since the discovery of a mysterious female corpse, preserved for 2,000 years in the moist sands of eastern China, this has changed.

The woman, named "Ling Huiping," was found with three others in an excavation. She was the only one well preserved. Visitors to the museum can see her hair, teeth, skin and toes. According to the museum experts, her brain, muscles, heart, lungs, liver and intestines are also intact. Ling Huiping is something of a scientific anomaly. Her coffin was found in an unusually warm and wet environment, and what most puzzles researchers is that her coffin is full of alkalescent liquid, prone to breeding bacteria. By all accounts, this important discovery shouldn't even exist.

A mysterious female corpse, named "Ling Huiping," was preserved for 2000 years in the moist beaches of eastern China. Visitors to the Lianyungang Museum can see her hair, teeth, skin and toes.

This high-profile exhibit has turned the public on to the importance of other sociological displays at the museum, mainly cultural relics dating back to the Stone Age. Speculation on the part of Chinese and Japanese archaeologists that the eastern part of Chinese mainland once connected with Japan, have shown resemblances between artifacts excavated around Lianyungang and Japan dating back to the Paleolithic period. One is a Dayi Mountain kistvaen tomb (three stones placed on edge, like the three sides of a box, with a stone cover) dating back to the Neolithic period. Instead of burying a whole kistvaen underground, its slabs were assembled above ground. The face of the corpse inside the coffin was covered by a red earthenware bowl.

A Han Bronze Boshan furnace.

Also rare and culturally significant is the Lianyungang museum's collection of wooden tablets and bamboo slips of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D.220). There are 24 wooden tablets and 133 bamboo slips similar in function to today's books. Before paper was invented, the Chinese wrote on quadrate bamboo slips, and strung them together. These tablets and slips are of great academic values, they were the official documents of the Han, recording annual statistics of administrative constructions, population censuses, cultivated farmlands, incomes and budgets. They are significant references for study of the history and economy of Lianyungang, as well as the bureaucratic system of the Han Dynasty.