It took six years to build Dingling and cost more than eight million taels of silver. When Dingling was about to be completed, Wanli personally visited here for the last time and then quietly returned to Beijing.
The archaeological excavation of the Ming Tombs began in 1950s and was proposed by Wu Han, a famous historian in China and then vice mayor of Beijing. This is the first archaeological plan formally put forward by historians in the history of China to excavate the tombs of ancient emperors.
Changling is the first choice in the excavation plan. Of all the Ming Tombs, Changling is the largest and the best preserved. However, the investigation in Changling is not progressing smoothly. Finally, the archaeological team decided to find another tomb for trial excavation. After many investigations, the mausoleum of Zhu Yijun (Emperor Wanli) was selected as Dingling.
1May, 956, the trial excavation officially started. In September, a migrant worker who participated in the excavation accidentally found a small stone tablet with lettering, which read: "This stone is sixteen feet to the front skin of the King Kong Wall and three feet and five feet deep". Ming people called the tomb wall of the underground palace "King Kong Wall", and this stone tablet clearly indicated the specific location of the underground palace.
1957 in may, the archaeological team passed through the thick soil layer and found the outer wall of the tomb-the king kong wall. On the King Kong Wall, archaeologists
The clerk found a mysterious trapezoidal opening. It should be the entrance when Emperor Wanli was buried.
Imitating the six palaces of the Forbidden City, there are two halls on the left and right of Dingling Underground Palace. The annex hall is connected with the main hall through a narrow tunnel. This should be the tomb of concubines, but the empty coffin bed shows that it has not really been used.
Finally, archaeologists found the back hall hidden in the deepest part of the underground palace, which corresponds to the imperial palace in the Forbidden City, and the back hall is equivalent to the bedroom where the emperor lived before his death. Before the excavation of Dingling, people knew that Dingling was the tomb of Emperor Wanli and two empresses, and the discovery of three coffins in the underground palace also confirmed the records in the literature.