Starting My Treasure Hunting In England

It is a custom for Indians to store treasures in temples. At the same time, these treasures are not hidden somewhere secretly. At least those in charge of the temple know this.

For example, the treasure trove in an Indian temple that Liang En heard about in his previous life happened in Kerala. In 2001, there was an Intelligence Bureau official named Sundara Rajang who had been during the Indira Gandhi government. After his retirement, Settled near the temple known as Padmanaba Swami Temple.

As a devout Hindu, Sundara Rajan, although he was over seventy years old, insisted on going to the temple to pray at 2 a.m. every day for up to 8 hours a day and used this time to conduct searches.

In 2009, Sundara Rajang found that the temple's security maintenance work was not enough, so he complained to the Kerala High Court, requesting that the government should take back the management rights of the temple and be responsible for the disposal and theft prevention of property in the temple.

It can be said that the virtues of Indian officials are well known to everyone, and it is naturally impossible to let go of benefits like this delivered to their doorsteps. In January 2011, the Kerala High Court ruled that the temple was taken over by the state government.

Before the official takeover, a committee of seven people was responsible for counting the total assets of the temple and making a list for filing. Before the inventory work began, the staff had already discovered that the temple had six underground chambers.

These secret rooms are numbered with the English letters a to f. The two secret rooms numbered "a" and "b" have not been opened in nearly 140 years.

On June 29, 2011, people opened secret room A and four other secret rooms, and the treasures discovered included gold jewelry, diamonds, and gems weighing nearly 1 ton.

There are also more than 1,200 gold chains weighing about 2.5 kilograms, 3 gold crowns, a 3.5-foot-tall diamond-encrusted Vishnu statue, a 1-ton gold elephant, etc. Others such as gold coins and gold products cannot be counted.

It is estimated that the value of these treasures exceeds 1 trillion rupees, approximately 145 billion yuan, or more than 20 billion US dollars. According to previous records, the richest temple in India is the Tirupati Temple in Andhra Pradesh.

However, the property value owned by the Tirupati temple is only 32,000 crore rupees. The value of the treasures owned by Padmanabhaswamy Temple far exceeds this figure, making it the richest temple in India.

But the problem is that these treasures are not ownerless. At least the local families knew about the existence of the treasure house, and many of the treasures were even donated by their ancestors.

This can also be regarded as a tradition among upper castes such as Brahmins and Kshatriyas in India. Wealthy upper caste members will donate wealth to temples, while those poor upper caste members can receive funding from temples.

For them, in addition to traditional religious needs, the temple can also provide them with financial support and also shoulder some insurance obligations.

In addition, for a country like India that is rife with illiteracy at the grassroots level and is still under a feudal rule system, don’t expect many public services. In this case, temples will naturally make up for this aspect.

To give the simplest example, once there is a natural or man-made disaster, these temples are often the important rescue core in the region and perform a series of grassroots services. This is why the internal systems of many Indian temples are extremely complex.

After all, for Indians, the temple is not a simple religious occasion, but a special occasion that has both grassroots government and the core of spiritual leadership.

Therefore, under this background, a large amount of wealth is often accumulated in Indian temples, so when Liang En and others realized that this was a secret room under the temple, their first reaction was that this place might have contained some kind of treasure.

That's right, there used to be treasures hidden there. After all, if you think about the gold and silver coins scattered on the ground and the explosives and traces of explosions found in the ruins above, you know that there is a low chance that those treasures are still there.

As they continued to advance, Liang En and the others' faces became more and more serious, because the depth and length of the tunnel were much larger than imagined.

Although there are no carvings on the stones beside the corridor, the fact that such a remote place can build an underground building of this scale is already very impressive, and it also proves the importance of this temple.

After walking more than 20 meters from the exit, Liang En and the others finally stopped, because at this time they discovered that a stone gate was installed on the road ahead.

"This should be the treasure room." He nodded while looking at the stone slab that was obviously blown open by explosives. "But just like we guessed before, this place should have been robbed."

"To be precise, it was completely looted." Fan Meng looked at the blown-to-shattered door and said, "I bet you that the things left for us there would only be a few coins or a Two small pieces of jewelry.”

"You're such a crow's mouth!" 40 minutes later, Liang En looked at Fan Meng and said with a depressed look on his face, because the pile of things they found with the metal detector couldn't even cover the palm of a person's hand.

Apparently the guys who had destroyed this place with explosives had completely looted this place, leaving only some small fragments in the mud.

In addition, they found several human remains, each with gunshot marks on them. If they guessed correctly, this was probably the scene left by the group of tomb robbers after they killed and silenced them.

Because Fan Meng could be sure that these people were shot in the back of the head after being tied up. If it is connected with the secret room of the temple, it is easy to guess that this situation should be related to murder and silence.

At the same time, after a brief analysis of the wounds on these people, they also determined that the pistol used by that group of people was a black powder revolver used by the British around 1860.

"It seems unlikely that the person who excavated was someone sent by the British official back then." After everyone came out of the basement, Joan of Arc carefully analyzed the previous situation after listening to their findings.

This was not to vindicate his British colonists, but to the British Indian officials at the time. If they wanted to excavate such abandoned relics, it would be enough to just dig them up. There was no need to choose to kill and silence them.

For those British colonists who were squeezing the ground in India, it was enough to just take whatever they wanted. All kinds of sneaky looks revealed that the guys who had become what they are now even did what they did in that era. It's also illegal.

"You are right, but I think so much wealth would be eye-catching in any era, so we should be able to find clues about this ruins." Liang En nodded to Joan of Arc.

"The next work will be completed by the servants and workers sent by the Varma family. They will clean the basement as much as possible, and then we can see if there are enough clues."

Next, Liang En and the others had lunch and waited for the search results of these workers. Soon after more than an hour, Liang En and the others, who were drinking tea, received new information.

"You mean there is an Englishman among the dead?" Liang En frowned after listening to the servant report on the current situation. "Take me to see it. I think the situation now may be different from what I imagined."