The Best Preserved Mummy in the World

This is an old piece of news but I still have to say it anyway…

At the height of the cold war, this was around in 1971, workers digging an air raid shelter near the city of Changsha uncovered an enormous tomb. Inside it they found over 1,000 perfectly preserved artifacts which was later on learnt were from the Han Dynasty. Among these bodies was that of Lady Dai’s, the most perfectly preserved corpse ever found.

Xin Zhui, the wife of the ruler of the Han imperial fiefdom of Dai, or the Lady of Dai, died between 178 and 145 BC, at around 50 years of age. The objects inside her tomb indicated that she was once a woman of wealth and importance, and one who enjoyed the good things in life. But these were not the things that fascinated me but her well-preserved remains which until now has baffled and amazed scientists all over the world.

“The body is so well preserved that it can be autopsied by pathologists as if it were only recently dead,” said a scientist who studied the body. Lady Dai’s skin was still “supple” and her limbs could still be manipulated, her hair was intact; her type A blood still ran red in her veins, and her internal organs were all intact. Imagine that for a 2,000 year-old corpse! (this was shown in Discovery Channel last week and I saw how flexible the mummy’s limbs were).

Experts could not yet fathom the mystery of Lady Dai’s remains. Was it because of her tomb construction that protected bacteria from getting into her body or was it because of the “mysterious liquid’ that the body was immersed in?” …These were just among the experts’ many questions. The liquid, they speculated, could be an elixir of life. Wow!

By the way if you want to see Lady Dai, her body is housed at the art Hunan Museum.