"Shovel Down in Luoyang" takes the undercurrent of tomb robbing in the north in the 1980s and 1990s as the background and restores the true ecology of the "Tufuzi" group. Lao He has been working as a tomb robber for thirty years. He has established himself in the circle with his skills of "identifying the color of soil with one shovel and determining the depth of a tomb with three poles." He takes his apprentice Xiao Ma through lonely graves in the wilderness and makes a living by reselling bits and pieces of "clear artifacts".
There are no legends in this industry. When checking out the coffin, you should read county records and pay close attention to the Feng Shui topography. When shoveling, you should avoid quicksand and accumulated stone. When opening the coffin, you should first prevent corpse poisoning and then identify the age of the artifacts. The so-called "rules" are nothing more than self-restraint for fear of retribution - not touching new graves, not taking burial objects, but they cannot stop the violent fights among peers for turf, and they cannot avoid the patrols' search lamps.
Ten years ago, during a Warring States tomb robbery, accomplices killed each other for the gilded bronze tripod. Lao He escaped with half of the broken tripod ear, which became a scar that he dared not touch. Nowadays, overseas buyers are eyeing a local "Prince's Tomb" and throwing huge sums of money at it. Even though Lao He knows it is a dead end, he still cannot resist the temptation. After teaming up to go to the tomb, the traps are secondary, and the calculations of people's hearts are more deadly: the novices are greedy and make mistakes, the veterans have their own agendas, and even the pony hides his own thoughts.
When the Luoyang shovel pierced the loess again, it brought out not only pottery fragments and bronze rust, but also the disturbed silence of thousands of years, as well as the struggles of the people at the bottom in poverty and desire. The moment the tomb door opens, what is exposed is never the treasure, but the roughest texture of human nature.
