The Mystery of Lady Dai’s Preserved Mummy

Believe it or not, this grotesque figure is considered to be one of the world’s best preserved mummies. While her face looks swollen and deformed, her skin is still soft to the touch, and there are no signs of rigor mortis anywhere—her arms and legs can still bend. Even her internal organs are intact and there is still blood in her veins. While other mummies tend to crumble at the slightest movement, the mummy of Lady Dai is so well-kept that doctors were able to perform an autopsy more than 2,100 years after her death. Not only were they able to reconstruct her death, but her life as well. They even determined her blood type—Type A. The autopsy of Lady Dai is arguably the most complete medical profile ever compiled on an ancient individual. The mummy of Lady Dai. Lady Dai, or Xin Zhui, was the aristocratic wife of a Han Dynasty nobleman Li Cang. There was no doubt she lived an extravagant life—her tomb was filled with luxuries that only the wealthiest of her era could afford. These include hundreds of richly embroidered silk garments, skirts, dainty mittens , a silk sachet filled with various spices, flowers, and fragrant reeds, boxes of cosmetics, more than a hundred lacquer ware, musical instruments and statuettes of musicians, even prepared meals and more than a thousand other items. “These objects show that Lady Dai lived a luxurious life, which she enjoyed very much,” says Willow Weilan Hai Chang , director of the China Institute Gallery in New York City, where some of the objects recovered from her tomb was displayed at an exhibition in 2009. “She wanted to maintain the same lifestyle in the afterlife.” It was this good life she craved for that eventually robbed her of it. Reputedly a beauty in her younger days, Lady Dai indulged herself in every culinary delight (such as scorpion soup) until her diminutive frame buckled under obesity. Art on her funerary banner depicted her leaning on a cane.