Research On The Shape And Production Technplogy Of Traditional Chinese Wooden Coffins

The grave is viewed as the home of the human soul,based on the early religious belief of the immortality of the soul.The funeral utensils come in a variety of styles and materials.Following Chinese tradition,the wooden coffin is the most often used burial equipment and has a lengthy history.At the Neolithic Age,traces of wooden coffins used by ancestors were discovered in the Banpo cemetery of the Yangshao Culture,and they are being used nowadays.At the same time,the wooden coffin is an imitation of the site where the dead lived and died,according to the ancient Chinese burial notion of death being the same as life.The major study object in this thesis is a wooden coffin,which was discovered while sorting through antique literature and archaeological artifacts and conducting field research.This dissertation discusses the history of burial instruments,the shape,ornamentation,and workmanship of wooden coffins,and the living circumstances of traditional wooden coffins in modern society.The findings of the study reveal that: First,the production of burial tools arose from the notion of soul immortality established by the ancestors' thinking about the occurrence of death.Second,in the pre-Qin era,the form of the wooden coffin had a clan property.As the trend of national unity and integration grew throughout the Qin and Han dynasties,the clan character of wooden coffins diminished and eventually began to shift closer to the rectangular box-shaped coffins of the Central Plains cultural area.Third,there are two forms of decorating for wooden coffins in the pre-Qin era.One is coffin decorating,which includes lacquering the surface of the coffin,mounting linen,and pasting gold foil embellishments.The second option is to cover the coffin or coffin cover with silk,that is,the wall willow curtain.Fourth,converting logs into coffins and adorning them are all part of the process of making wooden coffins.In the process of producing wooden coffins,single-wood coffins' craftsmanship centers on the "cutting" method of logs,whereas wooden coffins must be created of logs and then joined in a tenon-and-mortise structure.Fifth,in the context of modern society's funeral reform,traditional wooden coffin funerals have their unique worth even though they are no longer the norm.Many cultural elements featured in the wooden coffin cannot be adequately articulated because to the author's lack of cultural awareness.The author expects to be able to do further in-depth study in the future.