Volume One, Chapter 16: The Tomb of the Gambling King (Part Two)

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Did we just dig up the tomb of a gambling king?
I immediately made a pause gesture to stop everyone’s jeering. First, don’t say “grave robbing” — that makes us sound like those unscrupulous tomb raiders. Second, Master, please explain clearly: this is underwater, not 20th-century Macau. What basis do you have to claim this is the tomb of a “Gambling King”?

“Want proof? It’s right there in your hands.” Master Qi pointed at the two small towers I was holding. “Those two are actually game containers!”

Liubo chess, game containers.

Liubo chess sets from the Tang dynasty or even earlier did indeed have tower-shaped containers, resembling multi-layered steamers.

“As for the lapis lazuli-colored square stones you found at the base of the towers, those must be liubo game pieces,” Master Qi joked. “Fortunately, this homeowner was born more than a millennium ago; otherwise, with so many gambling items in hand, caught red-handed, he’d be sent for years of reform!”

“I remember I found the words ‘Golden Basin’ on the bottom of the pool. Could it mean that this Gambling King eventually repented, deciding to ‘wash his hands’ of gambling? That’s why all the tomb chambers have so many Tang dynasty glazed pottery figurines—he replicated his ill-gotten wealth and family assets proportionally into figurines and personally sank them into the water?” I pondered.

The idiom “wash one’s hands in a golden basin” originally came from Xiao He in the Western Han dynasty. By the Ming and Qing vernacular novels, it came to mean the same as today: to turn over a new leaf.

“What golden basin? I can’t remember. But this homeowner held no official position, yet built six entire courtyards, reaching the scale of a nobleman’s tomb, and managed to keep it secret from historical records—there’s definitely something fishy about this.” Master Qi told me.

“By the way, this homeowner’s grandfather was originally a reckless gambler. In the 20th year of the Kaiyuan era in the flourishing Tang dynasty, he met Li Bai, who was also passionate about liubo chess, at a casino. Seeing the homeowner’s grandfather utterly destitute from losing everything, Li Bai kindly played a game of liubo with him. Unexpectedly, fortune turned in his favor, and he won back his principal, solving his family’s urgent financial crisis.”

“Later, his grandfather’s luck improved, he married and had children, but couldn’t give up gambling. By the time it came to the homeowner’s generation, born of such a lineage, he truly inherited the family skill and became a ‘Gambling King’ of liubo chess, wealthy beyond measure. Nearing death, with money still unspent, he took his treasures to an island and rested there. Such gambler legends, of course, couldn’t enter ancestral halls or family genealogies in ancient times. Later generations just erected a simple stele with a few words.”

“Are you making this up? Where’s the evidence?” I nodded slightly, displeased.

Master Qi pointed to several archaeologists behind us, smiling, “Listen to them—they’re still decoding the inscriptions.”

Only then did I hear the team gathered before the inscribed stone wall, painstakingly deciphering the text.

After hearing the translations, Master Qi turned to relay the message to me.

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“You’re making the story more and more far-fetched, more like folklore than history. Can you just summarize properly?” I said sternly.

“This is the situation, apprentice. Just listen simply and don’t sweat the details,” Master Qi said. “What you need to notice is another important matter—the layout of this underwater tomb is very irregular. I kept an eye on the compass all along. The various gates, corridors, and vestibules inside the tomb are not aligned to the cardinal directions. They’re all jumbled. As for the courtyards, murals, and burial goods—they all break the usual rules.”

Master Qi explained that what normally corresponds to order is natural formation. Could it be that humans didn’t dig this cavern at all, but that it’s a naturally formed underwater cave?

“In the south, especially in the southwestern mountains, sometimes caves are hollowed out as burial sites, adapting to local conditions. Comparing with the Tang dynasty’s two capitals—the western capital Chang’an in Shaanxi, and the eastern capital Luoyang in Henan—we often hear about treasures underground and kilometers of Han and Tang dynasty tombs. That’s because the north and central plains are mostly flat terrain with soft soil, easy to dig with shovels. But in the southern mountains, has anyone ever heard of digging ancient tombs stretching kilometers through granite at a mountainside? That’s nonsense—unless they were tunneling for the Qinghai-Tibet railway, and even that is harder.”

I impatiently said, “Save it. I’ve long suspected this is a manmade underwater cave. Didn’t I tell you before? Looks like you weren’t really listening.”

“I’m not done yet. I feel the term ‘underwater cave’ isn’t quite right. This tomb is not only below sea level but beneath the seabed, possibly deeper within geological strata. Perhaps it’s something between a cave and a reef cavity—a ‘hollow’ formed by tectonic movements.” Master Qi gestured with his hands.

“A hollow?”

“I’m no geologist, so I can’t give you a precise term. But imagine the seabed as a range of undulating ridges. The islands above the sea are like mountain peaks, and the underwater hollows are the caves halfway up the mountainside,” Master Qi analyzed. “This Gambling King, before dying, decided to quit gambling and took his treasures to find a remote island to bury himself secretly. Unexpectedly, in digging downward, perhaps by accident or miscalculation of direction, they hit this underwater hollow. It’s like digging from a mountain peak into a mountainside cave.”

“So he was buried in this hollow. The nearby smaller cavities weren’t wasted but turned into subsidiary tombs?” I thought aloud. “Earlier, experts said they recovered some Tang dynasty replicas of Spring and Autumn and Warring States period bronzes. Those artifacts might have come from these subsidiary tombs.”

So this Gambling King wasn’t deliberately defying the royal court by building an oversized tomb. The underwater hollow was naturally large and spacious from the start, with many natural caves inside. They couldn’t just leave the rooms empty.

As for why the burial goods and murals don’t follow the usual rules, it’s because they had to conform to the natural reef patterns and stone cavity sizes—something no human could fully control.

“I see now,” I suddenly understood. “That means this underwater hollow really is like a long underwater tunnel. We’ve been climbing along the ‘ridge,’ from the seabed ‘foot’ gradually upward to the ‘peak.’ At the peak is a small island rising above sea level—the entrance to the entire tomb and also our exit!”

“Don’t celebrate too soon. That is, if we can get out.” Master Qi turned to the last few stone gates. “No one would build a tomb like a beehive with multiple exits. There’s probably only one way out.”

The inscriptions on the stone wall confirmed his guess:

They said that when the tomb was originally built, the “Shu Road,” “Yelang,” and “Lintao” gates led to other courtyard tomb chambers, not the exit.

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So only two paths lay before us.

“Yumen Pass” or “Hangu Pass”—choose one.

Arguments broke out loudly among the group:

“There are many treasures and jade here; we should pick Yumen Pass!”

“No way! Tang Daoism was the state religion, and the Daoist patriarch Laozi rode a blue ox through Hangu Pass!”

...

“Stop guessing wildly,” I interrupted firmly, quieting everyone.

Then I turned to Master Qi, “We’ve passed through several small tomb chambers along the way, but studied them separately—some hold water, some hold sand, some contain coffins, some have inscriptions. Is it possible that all these stone gates and chambers form a whole? Like advanced calculus, if we connect the sequence of these small caves, maybe we can find a pattern?”

Master Qi immediately caught on. “You mean, since we’re looking for the exit—originally the entrance—let’s integrate all the clues from the chambers and work backward for the final answer? Hey, that’s an interesting idea. Wait a moment, let me take a look.”

Everyone else looked on puzzled, but he smiled and closed his eyes.

Only I knew he was mentally mapping the positions of every stone wall and hole.

Though we couldn’t retrace our steps physically, Master Qi didn’t need to look back; his mind was a perfect recording device, reconstructing the entire route flawlessly.