Reflections | The Chinese scholar who threw himself in a well, and the palace consort ‘martyred’ in one
In 1900 a scholar jumped in a Beijing well out of shame. A palace consort died in a Forbidden City well too. Was she ‘martyred’ or killed?
Archaeologists in Norway, who conducted tests on exhumed skeletal remains found in an ancient well, are convinced they have found the unnamed man whose body, according to an 830-year-old saga, was flung into a well during a siege of a castle.
The skeleton in the well, in the central Norwegian city of Trondheim, was discovered in 1938, but the Second World War put a stop to further exploration.
It was only in 2014 that Norwegian archaeologists “remembered” the man in the well, and proper scientific study of the human remains began.
Thirty-eight years before the discovery of the Norwegian “well man”, as he came to be known, an emperor’s consort and an eminent scholar-turned-soldier in China also ended up at the bottom of wells in the besieged city of Beijing.
It was mid-August 1900 and the Chinese capital was surrounded by troops of the Eight-Nation Alliance – America, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.
