How did a Swiss ring watch end up in a 400-year-old sealed Ming Dynasty tomb?

The Empire of the Great Ming ruled in China from 1368 to 1644, and at that time, such watches were not there in China or anywhere else on Earth.

In 2008, Chinese archaeologists discovered a century old small Swiss watch object from an ancient tomb of the Ming dynasty. The startling part is that the historic tomb had no longer been opened for the last 400 years.

Swiss Ring Watch Found in Shanxi Tomb, China
Swiss Ring Watch Found in Shanxi Tomb, China. Image Credit: Mail Online

The team of archaeologists claimed that they were the first who visited from inside this sealed grave of the Ming dynasty in Shanxi, Southern China, in the past four centuries.

They were filming a documentary with two journalists inside the tomb, eventually, they went near the coffin and tried to remove the soil wrapped around it for a better shot. Suddenly, a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with a metallic sound, they picked up the object and presumed it to be an ordinary ring but after removing the covering soil and examining it further, they were shocked to see it was a watch, and they immediately realized that it’s a miracle discovery.

The Empire of the Great Ming ruled in China from 1368 to 1644, and at that time, such watches were not there in China or anywhere else on Earth. An expert stated that Switzerland did not even exist as a country at the period of the Ming dynasty.

How did a Swiss ring watch end up in a 400-year-old sealed Ming Dynasty tomb? 1
“This is the earliest dated watch known. It is engraved on the bottom: Philip Melanchthon, to God alone the glory, 1530. There are very few watches existing today that predate 1550; only two dated examples are known–this one from 1530 and another from 1548. The perforations in the case permitted one to see the time without opening the watch.” Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The mysterious timepiece was showing stopped at 10:06 am. In reality, it’s a modern-looking Swiss ring with a watch face. However, this type of watch-designed ring was not common in any way during that time period. Yet, there can be a slight hope that it was made coincidentally.

How did a Swiss ring watch end up in a 400-year-old sealed Ming Dynasty tomb? 2
Interior of the Dingling Tomb, a part of the Ming Dynasty Tombs, collection of mausoleums built by the Chinese Ming dynasty emperors. Representational image only. Image Credit: Ancient Origin

Although there are no such reports of any of the ancient Chinese artifacts having suffered damage or theft, we can draw a rational conclusion to it in this way: maybe that someone later had gone secretly inside the tomb and somehow the “watch-like ring” was gone from him/her.

However, many have put forth the “Time Travel” theory behind this miracle discovery. Whether “Time Travel” or “Coincidence” whatever it was, it’s always amusing to witness such incredible archaeological finds. Sometimes these types of strange artefacts are referred to as the Out-of-place artifacts (OOPart).

Out-of-place artifact (OOPArt)

An OOPArt is a unique and little-understood object found in the historical, archaeological, or paleontological records which fall into the “anomalous” category. In other words, these objects have been found when and where they should not be and thus challenge the conventional understanding of history.

Though the mainstream researchers have always drawn a simple and rational conclusion to these artifacts, many believe OOPArts may even reveal that humanity had a different degree of civilization or sophistication than described and understood by officials and academia.

To this day, researchers have found out hundreds of such OOPArts including the Antikythera mechanism, the Maine Penny, the Shroud of Turin, Baghdad Battery, Saqqara Bird, Ica Stone, Stone Spheres of Costa Rica, London Hammer, Ancient Nanostructures of Ural Mountains, Nazca Lines and many more.