What they take moves through the hands of middlemen to collectors and auction houses in China and around the world. They operate in gangs that teach new recruits how to find and excavate tombs, grabbing only the most desirable artifacts.

According to the officers who chase them, most are former farmers and peasants. Tomb raiders work underground-literally and figuratively-and tend to hang out in the middle of nowhere, in places that were once on the periphery of great cities and rich trade routes. Experts guess that more than 400,000 ancient graves have been robbed in the last 20 years alone. It was what I had come to Henan to see, evidence of China’s tomb raiders, criminals who loot ancient graves to feed the antiquities market.Īccording to some estimates, there are around 100,000 looters in China. He was referring to a pile of fresh dirt next to the tree, the only above-ground sign of an 1,800-year-old Wei Dynasty tomb that, only two nights before, had been broken into and looted. “If you look to the right, just past the tree, the hole is there.” I looked in the direction he was pointing and told him what I saw: more millet.

Do you see that tree?” A portly officer from the Henan Public Security Bureau stood in the cracked mud of an irrigation ditch and pointed at a single, leafless tree in the middle of a field of millet.

Just cause 3 ancient tomb