his worst enemy had become family

2,600 years ago, in a tomb in central China, someone made a baffling decision: to dismantle a spectacular set of 21 bronze bells and scatter their pieces around. He then sealed the burial chamber forever. When finding those bells, it would be normal to think that this arrangement was due to looting or an accident, but a recent study archaeologist Chinglong Tse of University College London has discovered that no: it was a premeditated and deliberate act.

The discovery. The tomb is in the Zaoshulin cemetery, in Suizhou (Hubei, China) and corresponds to someone identified as Lord Qiu of Zeng, an aristocrat who ruled approximately between 675-650 or 650-625 BC. Those 21 bronze bells are called Zeng Gong Qiu bianzhong and the usual thing (if nothing strange has happened) is to find them in order, but here they appeared scattered and with their wooden support disassembled.

But not. He sediment analysis rules out that the cause of the disorder was looting, since the land was compact and intact, which reflects that this arrangement was the original.

It happened in a turbulent time. This point is essential to understand the decision to dismantle and scatter the bells: the burial takes place in the Chunqiu period (771-453 BC), a time of political fragmentation after the decline of the Zhou dynasty in which several states competed for territory. More specifically, Zeng was located in the so-called “Suisse corridor”, a strategic position between the central plains and the Yangtze River valley.

This territory was of interest to its neighbor, the powerful state of Chu, and therefore constituted a military threat. In this scenario, Lord Qiu had his funeral bells made with an inscription invoking his ancestors to ask for help. Spoiler: in the end it was not necessary because at some point during his reign, the king of Chu gave his sister Mi Yu in marriage to Qiu, which sealed peace.

What do the bells mean?. As Chinglong Tse maintains in his paper, in Chinese archeology bells were not mere musical instruments, but ritual objects that functioned as a kind of communication channels between the living and dead members of a lineage. When the political situation that had made them necessary disappeared, they no longer had a purpose.

So dismantling the support of those bells so that they would not ring is equivalent to canceling that request for help. Or what is the same: that disorder in his funerary trousseau is an intentional act and loaded with meaning. The help of his ancestors was no longer needed.

Don’t miss the bells. In addition to these scattered and “deactivated” remains of bells, what they did find in the funeral chamber was a second, more modest set of 13 bells that were placed in an orderly manner. As the archaeologist explains, Qiu commissioned a smaller and simpler set with the aim of maintaining his ritual link with the ancestors in the afterlife.

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Cover | The Bells Are Harmonious and Resonant’: Numinous Ancestors, Resonant Bells and the Personhood of Lord Qiu of Zeng in Tomb M190 at Zaoshulin, Hubei