Surgeons who first examined Lady Xin Zhui’s body in 1972 found her joints still movable, her skin elastic, and her blood group identifiable, some 2,100 years after her burial in a tomb northeast of modern Changsha, at Mawangdui.
一九七二年,医护人员首次对辛追夫人的遗体进行检验时发现,历经两千一百年,她的关节依然可以活动,皮肤仍富有弹性,甚至连血型都能辨识,而她的墓葬,就位于今日长沙城东北的马王堆。
Her tomb was one of three excavated at the site between 1972 and 1974, yielding more than 3,000 relics in total, including silk manuscripts bearing the earliest known copies of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching, and a robe of unlined gauze so fine it weighed under 50 grams despite measuring over a metre and a half long.
她的墓葬是一九七二年至一九七四年间发掘的三座墓葬之一,共出土文物三千余件,其中包括写有现存最早版本《周易》与《道德经》的帛书,以及一件素纱单衣,尽管长逾一米半,重量却不足五十克,轻薄异常。
Modern Changsha’s economy rests on heavier things. Sany Group and Zoomlion, both headquartered in the city, between them acquired three of the world’s leading concrete-machinery manufacturers, Putzmeister, Schwing and CIFA. Changsha’s GDP reached ¥1.527 trillion in 2024, up 5.2 percent on the previous year, with its permanent population standing at roughly 10.72 million.
现代长沙的经济,则建立在更为厚重的产业之上。三一集团与中联重科两家总部均设于长沙的企业,先后收购了普茨迈斯特、施维英与西法三家全球领先的混凝土机械制造商。长沙二零二四年GDP达一点五二七万亿元人民币,同比增长百分之五点二,常住人口约为一千零七十二万人。
That same appetite for scale showed up in construction too; a local firm assembled a 57-storey building known as Mini Sky City in just 19 days in 2015, using prefabricated modular sections at a rate its builders said reached three floors a day.
这份对规模的追求,也体现在建筑业中;二零一五年,一家本地企业采用预制模块化施工技术,仅用十九天便建成一座五十七层高楼——”小天城”,据建设方介绍,施工速度一度达到日均三层。
After Dark on Jiefang West Road
解放西路的夜晚
By day, Jiefang West Road looks like any other stretch of downtown Changsha; after dark, it becomes the city’s densest concentration of nightclubs, multi-storey venues fitted with LED ceilings, stage elevators and sound systems built to fill rooms far larger than a typical Chinese bar street. Two venues in particular, Play House and Supre Monkey, have become fixtures of the strip, booking international DJs and drawing crowds that spill onto the pavement well past 2am most weekends.
白天的解放西路,与长沙市中心其他街道并无二致;入夜之后,这里则变成全城夜店最为密集的一条街,多层建筑内配备着LED天幕、升降舞台,以及远超普通中国酒吧街规模的音响系统。其中,Play House与Supre Monkey两家夜店尤为知名,常邀请国际知名DJ驻场,大多数周末凌晨两点过后,人群仍会溢出到人行道上。
A few streets over, Huangxing Road pedestrian street stays busy with livestreamers well past midnight, selling Changsha’s black stinky tofu and local sausage from stalls that rarely close before one in the morning; Wenheyou, a chain that grew from a single street vendor in 2011 into a franchise with outlets across the country, began there.
几条街外的黄兴路步行街,直播博主们在深夜仍熙熙攘攘,摊位上售卖着长沙特色黑色臭豆腐与本地香肠,往往要到凌晨一点才收摊;如今已开设全国连锁门店的品牌”文和友”,正是从这里的一个街边小摊起步的。
Hunan Television, and its online arm Mango TV, built a reputation on variety and talent shows including Super Girl and Super Boy, formats that launched the careers of numerous Chinese celebrities and gave the city a nickname of its own, the entertainment capital of China.
湖南卫视及其旗下新媒体平台芒果TV,凭借《超级女声》《快乐男声》等选秀综艺节目声名鹊起,这些节目捧红了众多中国艺人,也让这座城市赢得了”中国娱乐之都”的别称。
Founded in 976, Still Holding Classes
创办于九七六年,至今仍在授课
Yuelu Academy has stood on the slopes of Yuelu Mountain since 976, founded during the Song dynasty and now counted among the oldest institutions of higher learning anywhere in the world; it survived long enough to be absorbed into Hunan University, and still holds classes on its original grounds.
岳麓书院自公元九七六年北宋年间创建以来,便矗立于岳麓山麓,是当今世界上历史最悠久的高等学府之一;这座书院后来并入湖南大学,至今仍在原址授课。
Little of the wider city fared as well. Shortly after midnight on 13 November 1938, Nationalist officials ordered Changsha set alight under a scorched-earth policy meant to deny the city to advancing Japanese forces, who had not in fact continued their advance past Yueyang. According to a People’s Daily account of the disaster, the fire burned for five days, destroyed more than 90 percent of the city’s houses, and killed over 3,000 people by the Nationalist government’s own published count at the time.
城中其他大部分区域,却未能同样幸免。一九三八年十一月十三日凌晨,国民党官员密令火烧长沙,意图以焦土政策阻止日军进城,尽管日军在攻占岳阳后其实并未继续南下推进。据《人民日报》相关报道显示,这场大火燃烧了整整五天,烧毁了全城逾九成的房屋,并按国民政府当时公布的数字,造成三千余人丧生。
Getting to Changsha today means choosing between six metro lines covering nearly 218 kilometres, a system that opened its first line in 2014 but carried a peak of 4.675 million riders in a single day by 2025. Line 6 runs directly to Huanghua International Airport, connected further by a maglev link and by Changsha South, one of the busiest stations on the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed line, putting Guangzhou under three hours away.
如今前往长沙,可选择六条地铁线路,总里程近二百一十八公里;这套系统于二零一四年开通首条线路,到二零二五年,单日最高客流量已达四百六十七点五万人次。六号线直达黄花国际机场,机场还接入磁浮线路,并与武广高铁沿线最繁忙的站点之一长沙南站相连,前往广州不足三小时。
Lady Xin Zhui’s body, predating both the fire and everything built since, now sits under climate control at the Hunan Provincial Museum, a short drive from the tomb where it lay undisturbed for over two thousand years.
辛追夫人的遗体,早于那场大火,也早于此后建成的一切,如今保存在湖南省博物馆经过严格温控的展厅中,距离她曾安然长眠两千余年的墓葬,仅有咫尺车程。
