Beachcombing always comes to China with a certain trepidation. After all, he doesn't have much Mandarin (i.e. absolutely zilch), he has an embarrassingly modest knowledge of Chinese historiography and yet he must admit to having nothing but fascination for the exotic flowers that grow in the swamps of the Chinese past – recent oriental posts have included manned kite flight and (alleged) Roman legionaries in ancient China.
The danger, of course, is that the sirens pull you into the mud and before you know it the water’s pouring over the top of your Wellington boots. And how much worse that water feels when ‘China’ combines with another unknown like, say, ‘metallurgy’. Welcome, please, oh reader, the Nanjing Belt.
Beachcombing will quickly get the routine details out of the way. The Nanjing Belt was discovered in a tomb in 1952 around a skeleton. The tomb and the body dated to the Jin Dynasty that brings us back to the early centuries A.D (265-420) and luckily the name of the occupant was established through an inscription. He was one Zhou Chou (obit 297) who died fighting, of all people, the Tibetans.
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