1972, when Mrs. Xin Zhui of Mawangdui Han Tomb reappeared in front of the world after spending more than 2,000 years underground, the whole world was in awe of China's exquisite anti-corrosion technology in ancient times. With her fresh face and elastic skin, Mrs. Xin Zhui made the world understand the subtlety of wet corpse preservation.

Ancient aristocrats not only emphasized the making of coffins, but also demanded materials such as camphor wood, pine and cypress, paulownia, etc., which had aromatic insect-proof function, and also had certain depth requirements for tombs, which was nothing more than delaying or avoiding the process of corpse corruption. The ancients thought that "golden jade breeds cold", and burying a corpse with golden jade can make it not bad. There is a saying in the Biography of Han Yang Wang Sunzhuan that "the mouth contains jade, which can't be changed, and the depression is dry wax", so there is a saying of jade clothes and jade coffins.

What is the antiseptic effect of today? The king of Chu died in the jade coffin, but it was just a pile of bones; Mr. and Mrs. Liu Sheng saved themselves with only a few decayed teeth; Emperor Wanli of Ming Shenzong was even naked. The decomposition of bacteria is the main cause of corpse corruption in tombs. Bacteria are divided into aerobic bacteria and anaerobic bacteria. To inhibit the activity of aerobic bacteria, in addition to sterilization, the body must be sealed to prevent air from entering. In this respect, China people reached a fairly high level in the Western Han Dynasty.

Before the funeral, the deceased should bathe the body with fragrant soup and then scrub it with wine. Xiao Zongbo, the official in charge of the sacrificial ceremony of the Zhou royal family, has two kinds of servants. The former cooks soup with tulip grass and makes wine with black millet, while the latter bathes the body with fragrant soup and millet wine. This not only makes the body "fragrant", but also has a certain disinfection effect. The spraying of wine is more conducive to accelerating the oxygen consumption in the coffin after sealing and establishing anoxic conditions. Tightly binding the corpse with clean underwear and quilt can also help isolate the air and inhibit the early corruption of the corpse. The coffins used in Han Dynasty are of high quality. The walls, top and bottom of the coffin are all made of one piece of material. The inside and outside of the coffin are painted, and the lid of the inner coffin is sealed with sticky paint, which makes the coffin have good air tightness. In addition, there was a custom of using mercury and arsenic to prevent corrosion in ancient China. After chemical identification, Mawangdui female corpse has two obvious characteristics: one is mercury treatment, and the other is soaking. The sediment of coffin liquid (formed by the infiltration of external water vapor) contains a lot of mercury sulfide, ethanol, acetic acid and other components, which plays a role in fixing the cells of the corpse and becomes the key factor for the body discovered not to rot.

Feudal nobles attached great importance to deep burial and regarded thick soil as the best shelter. Their graves are deep and big and they are not allowed to breathe. In such an environment, the tomb can be effectively isolated from the outside air, maintaining a constant temperature and not affected by climate change. Let's see how the closed mausoleum has changed in the long two thousand years. At the beginning of burial, the environment of the tomb allowed spoilage bacteria to grow and reproduce, but the oxygen in the tomb was rapidly consumed by a large number of organic substances such as birds, fish, meat and eggs in the funerary objects, and because the inner coffin and the tomb were sealed, an anoxic environment was formed in the tomb, which inhibited aerobic bacteria. At this time, only anaerobic bacteria played a role in the process of corruption, but it could not be popularized, because protein, fat and organic acids produced by the decomposition of silk buried in the corpse gradually turned the environment in the coffin into acidity, which led to the inadaptability of anaerobic bacteria and eventually died, thus finally stopping the process of corpse corruption.