The Dragon Comes Forth...
Among the descendants of the Mohe suppressed by the Liao Dynasty were people known as the Jurchen or Nuzhen. Given to internal tribal strife, they became united under the clan leadership of Wanyan Aguda in the early years of the twelfth century. Skilled hunters and horsemen, they soon overthrew the Liao Dynasty. In A.D. 1115, Aguda declared the formation of the Jin or "Golden" Dynasty for the Jurchen, with its first capital of Shangjing just outside of modern Harbin. The first conquest dynasty to emerge from northeastern China's Tungusic speakers, the Jin Dynasty went on to displace the Song Dynasty into southern China.

Because the early years of the Jin state focussed on Heilongjiang, that province provided an abundance of Jin artifacts for the exhibition, from the ploughshares and porcelains of everyday life, to the tools of war and Imperial playthings (bronze mirrors, open work jades, golden belt ornaments).

The centrepiece of the Black Dragon exhibition was without question a selection of artifacts from the tomb of Qi Guo Wang. Villagers from Chengzi, who planned to build a house in May of 1988, accidentally discovered the tomb. Their digging revealed a stone and timber-lined crypt, containing the remains of a high ranking Jin Dynasty noble (with the feudal title of Qi Guo Wang and the Jurchen name of Wanyan Yan) and an accompanying woman. Inscriptions on the tomb indicate that they were buried in A.D. 1162, just nine years after the Jin Dynasty moved its capital to the Beijing area.

Relatively little known inside China, and virtually unknown outside of China, the Qi Guo Wang tomb was sealed with quicklime. The extraordinary preservation conditions meant that all of the grave goods associated with the couple survived. And they are remarkable. The tomb contains one of the largest inventories of silk garments from the ancient world. The wooden timber inside the stone crypt was lined with a deep red silk shroud imprinted with real gold dragon designs. The man wore eight complete layers of garments, the woman nine. The garments include silk robes, belts, stirrup style pants, leggings, hats and shoes.

As the thirteenth century dawned, the Mongols began to pose a serious threat to the Jin. Though the Mongols eventually spread like wildfire, quickly conquering vast reaches of Asia and Europe, their conquest of the waning Jin Dynasty took more than twenty years of protracted warfare. The climactic battles in the overthrow of the Jin featured some of the earliest, extensive use of gunpowder in city sieges. With the end of the Jin Dynasty in A.D. 1234, Mongol forces laid waste to large parts of Jurchen territory. The Yuan (A.D. 1279-1368) and succeeding Ming (A.D. 1368-1644) Dynasties are treated as minor themes in the exhibition through bronzes and porcelains.

At the heart of the Black Dragon exhibition, the visitor came to a reconstruction of Qi Guo Wang's tomb as it was discovered and excavated. A cousin and uncle to the first Jin Emperors, this man and the woman with him (likely a favoured concubine) belonged to the Jin Dynasty elite.

The Provincial Museum of Alberta secured for exhibition several items from the Qi Guo Wang tomb, among them the woman's delicate hat with butterfly design, her exquisite embroidered silk slippers, the nobleman's hat, the gold wedges held in his hands, stirrup style pants, and leggings. Virtually all of the tomb garments are made of the highest quality silk, with incredibly detailed gold thread embroidery or gold imprinting of designs including dragons, phoenixes, and floral themes.

The Qi Guo Wang Tomb reveals much about the context of other beautiful artifacts exhibited from the "Golden" Dynasty, including open work jades, porcelains, and gold ornaments.

Heilongjiang archaeologists realized immediately that the discovery was highly significant. Consequently, a major recovery operation was put in place so that the entire contents of the tomb were removed to a Harbin hospital. There, the tomb was x-rayed by medical staff and opened by Heilongjiang archaeologists and staff of the Imperial Palace Museum in Shenyang. Layer after layer, the lustrous garments were gently removed from the couple, along with the grave goods accompanying them into the after-life. Heilongjiang officials video-recorded this entire process; the Black Dragon exhibition featured a 20 minute video presentation of this remarkable discovery process (never before aired) for the Qi Guo Wang Tomb.