Lady DAI

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capt_buzzard
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Lady DAI

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For more than 2,000 years, little was known about Xin Zhui, the wife of a Chinese ruler. Now we know she enjoyed the finest of everything her civilisation had to offer and the luxury may have been her downfall.

The discovery of her mummifed corpse and burial chamber has provided a remarkable insight into the life and times of a woman now known as Lady Dai.

Scientists say her body is the best-preserved mummy ever seen, surpassing any from Egypt, and leading to her being nicknamed the 'Botox Babe'. Teams from America and New Zealand have built up a picture of a woman once renowned for her beauty, but whose life of ease married to the ruler of the Han imperial fielddom of Dai was ultimately her undoing.

They say being waited on hand and foot and enjoying a diet rich in fatty foods, including dog and oxen may have contributed to her death from heart disease.

She was an aristocrat, said Dr Charles Higham, an anthropologist from the University of Otago in New Zealand. 'There would have been a lot of music, a lot of incense. There would have been servants at your every beck and call.

Scientists are now trying to unravel the secrets of the embalming technique used to preserve her body so successfully.

Her coffin contained a reddish liquid, the ingredients of which are not fully known, but which may have been considered the 'elixir' of imortality' in ancient China.

Lady Dai lived in the Western Chinese dynasty of Han, which existed between 206BC and 24AD. As the wife of the Marquis of Han, she was a woman of great wealth and status.

Her tomb was discovered in 1971 by workers digging an air raid shelter on the outskirts of Changsha in Hunan Province. She died aged around 50,between 178 and 145BC and was buried with 1,000 items including lacquer dinnerware and fine fabrics.

Two thirds of the artefacts were related to food and drink, including 30 bamboo caskets containing pears,plums,soy beans, sliced locusts, swans,dogs,pheasants,pigs,oxen and other animals. There were also lists of favourite recipes.

Lady Dai's medical profile is the most complete ever assembled on an ancient. But autopsies on her body, in which all her organs were perfectly preserved and her brain remained intact despite having shunk to half size, having revealed the downside of her fondness for the highlife.

Continued,

Pathologists concluded she had been a great belle with cherry-like lips and oval eyes'in her youth. But it was obvious her beauty deserted her before death. She was badly overweight, at almost 11stone.

X-rays reveal she had a fused disc in her spine, which would have caused severe back pain, and clogged corobary arteries. She had gallstones and experts believe one of them, stuck in her bile duct, may have cause her already weakened heart to stop.

Experts have been astonished at how well her body has stood the test of time. Her skin is still soft to the touch. her limbs can still be bent, she retains almost a full head of hair and she even has blood in her veins, identified as type A.

Today the corpse is on display at Hunan Museum in Changsha. She has become famous in China as Tutankhamen is in Egypt.

Anthropologist Professor John Verano said, What really sets her apart is the flexibility of her limbs. When I first saw it, it made me jump.

No one's found anything remotely equivalent to this. If she'd only been buried a year I would be amazed at how well-preserved she was, to think that she has been buried for 2,000 years and is in this condition is baffling.

The tomb offers several clues . Lady Dai's corpse was swaddled in 20 layers of fine silk, which would have suffocated the bacteria which normally devour the body soon after death.

The body was also inside four coffins and placed in a 20ft square chamber so to cool it and it acted like a natural refrigerator. Five tons of charcoal were piled on top followed by 4ft of clay and 50ft of earth to ensure the tomb was 'vacum sealed for eternity'.

Some scientists suspect the real key to her preservation, however, may lie in the reddish liquid in which the body was immersed.

If so, the secret may have died with her. Tests have revealed it is mildly acidic and contains magnesium and salt, but have so far failed to identify all its contents.

Robin Yapp. www.dailymail.co.uk
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