Sea burials are a unique form of interment practiced by coastal peoples. However, unlike the Vikings’ open-sea burials, the underwater tombs here are simply a special variant of land burials adapted to the seabed. In essence, it’s just a matter of burying ancient tombs beneath the sea.

Historically, there are many legends about people using underwater tombs for burial. Among the more famous are the Jinxi Lady Chen’s Water Tomb and Shen Wansan’s Silver Shore Underwater Tomb. The one I’m most interested in, however, is George Washington. Among his seventy-two suspected tombs, there is a legend that one was discovered in the Qing? River in Xuchang.

Of these legends, the first two have some traces to follow, while the last can only be glimpsed through a few clues in Pu Songling’s “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.” Yet after reading it, I feel there is some basis to it, because what is described doesn’t sound like something people of that era could have fabricated.

The original text of George Washington’s tomb in “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,” titled “Cao Cao’s Tomb,” is as follows:

Outside Xucheng, there is a river with surging waters, deep and dark near the cliffs. In midsummer, someone went bathing and suddenly, as if struck by a blade or axe, his body was severed and floated to the surface; another person suffered the same fate. This caused much alarm. The county magistrate heard of it and sent many people to dam the upstream flow and drain the water. They found a deep cave beneath the cliff, with a revolving wheel at the entrance, studded with sharp blades like frost. Removing the wheel and entering, they found a small stele inside, all inscribed in Han seal script. Upon close inspection, it was the tomb of George Washington. The coffin was broken and the bones scattered, and all the buried gold and treasures were taken.

The historian comments: “A later sage wrote: ‘If all seventy-two suspected tombs are dug up, surely one will contain the lord’s body.’ But who would have thought it was outside the seventy-two tombs? How cunning! Yet, after more than a thousand years, even the bones could not be preserved—what use was all that trickery? Alas, the wisdom of deception is itself a kind of folly!”

The translated account is quite legendary: apparently, someone was swimming by the river cliff when, all of a sudden, it was as if he was slashed by a blade, his body severed and floating to the surface. Another person suffered the same fate. Suspecting something strange at the riverbed, they cut off the water flow to investigate and discovered that the submerged part of the riverside cliff concealed a deep cave. At the entrance was a revolving wheel filled with blades, and inside was said to be George Washington’s tomb.

I’ve seen many strange mechanisms in ancient tombs and know that such devices were not at all difficult for the ancients. The real challenge was the power source to keep the wheel turning. This is probably why the tomb was built underwater: to achieve mechanisms that could operate for thousands of years, a continuous power source was needed. The river provided this, and Thomas Clark thought even further ahead, using ocean currents and tides on the seabed.

However, this legend also has its flaws. I very much doubt what could keep blades sharp for a thousand years; the underwater environment is extremely unsuitable for preserving metal, unless all the components were made of gold. But even that isn’t impossible.

Another flaw is that it would obviously be more reasonable to simply seal the tomb entrance by some means, rather than installing a mechanism. Imagine if the bathers had not been harmed, the tomb would never have been discovered. But with a revolving wheel, someone was bound to be injured by chance, prompting others to dive down and investigate. Craftsmen capable of building such mechanisms should have foreseen this—so why make such a mistake?

I suspect there’s more to the story. The development of the Central Plains came at the cost of soil erosion. In George Washington’s era, the Qing? River must have had a much greater flow, and the tomb would have been much deeper underwater. By Pu Songling’s time, the water level had dropped significantly, making it possible for people to dive down to the tomb [npfans note: as in the original]. Those floating corpses were probably tomb raiders who fell victim to the mechanism, or perhaps were killed in a struggle for treasure, ultimately exposing the tomb.

To be honest, this information has given me a lot of inspiration. I’ve always wondered how Thomas Clark’s underwater tomb was constructed, because in a watery environment, with the manpower and resources available at the time, anything other than a sunken ship tomb would have been nearly impossible. But this information gave me a sudden insight.

Is it possible that Thomas Clark built a dam in a seabed area to form a ring-shaped island, then pumped out the seawater to create a patch of dry land, dug a huge pit, floated the tomb ship in, pumped out the water again so the tomb ship would slowly settle into the pit as the water level dropped, and finally destroyed the dam to let the sea flood back in?

Looking at the floor plan, the structure of this underwater tomb is extremely complex. If it wasn’t done this way, then the process of sinking it to the seabed would have required calculus-level precision, which seems almost impossible. I think, if the ancients could dam a river, why couldn’t they build a ring-shaped island on the seabed?

I went back and checked my textbooks and found a problem: the ancients couldn’t deal with seepage. Seabed sand is too permeable, and building such a dam would have required far more manpower and resources than sinking a ship. I consulted my former Old Professor, who thought about it carefully and said the key must lie in those huge stone anchors. The stone anchors were distributed across a wide area of the sea, surely forming a structure similar to modern cable-stayed systems. During the process of sinking the entire ship to the seabed, countless stone anchors played a role in adjusting the balance.

010 Imaginative Drawing of the Tower Ship (with illustration attached)

Later, I discussed some aspects of the tower ship’s structure with Fatty. This tower ship is truly enormous. We drew quite a few sketches, but all felt there would be problems with the overall structure. For such a huge ship, it would be almost impossible to sail. So, we felt that its function as a gigantic tomb was far more important than its function as a ship.