A Record of the Four Arts of Tomb Raiding

In the secretive world of tomb raiding, the inheritance of the Mojin Xiaowei is no fantastical legend, but a contest of practical skills. With rigorous realism, The Four Mojin Principles: A Factual Account lays bare the true face of folk tomb raiding in China.

It begins with family precepts passed down through generations, while bronze compasses and silk maps trace the fate of the Mojin clans. Uncle Three’s four-part method of “observing, listening, questioning, and examining,” Uncle Two’s centipede ladder for scaling mountains, and Uncle Four’s lessons on tomb architecture carefully unpack the hard-won skills of reading the land, locating tombs, and identifying burial sites.

From decoy tombs on Mount Mang to hidden treasures beyond the passes, they brave quicksand and poisonous fumes, break through linked mechanisms, and fight back against ruthless bandits in the shifting sands. They follow flood season to find water tombs and dig through frozen earth to uncover Liao tombs. Every step carries real risks, from cave-ins to government crackdowns.

“Ghosts walking in circles” are magnetic stones disrupting direction; “corpse transformation” is the work of fungi. Every uncanny mystery has a scientific explanation. When the five factions clash and a broken stele reveals the ties between the family and the tomb’s occupant, the act of burning the records becomes the ultimate question about a life spent raiding tombs: caught between traditional skills and the rules of the modern world, should the Mojin Xiaowei’s legacy be buried in the earth, or reduced to ashes?