Doubts About the Guanyin Looking at the Sea Tomb at Sanliao

The Zeng family of Sanliao has an ancestral tomb named, by form-reading (hexing), "Guanyin Looking at the Sea" (Guanyin Wanghai). It is said that the Zeng ancestors had single heirs generation after generation; after this tomb was buried as Guanyin Looking at the Sea, the family fortune gradually prospered and there were no more single-heir cases, and the line multiplied to the present.

However, on careful examination of the Zeng family genealogy, the person buried at Guanyin Looking at the Sea was Madam Zhong, the ancestral grandmother of the Zeng family's tenth generation. After her burial, the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth generations were all single heirs; the thirteenth generation had three sons, but only one left descendants, so the fourteenth generation again had only one person, and by the fifteenth generation still only a single son.

Only in the fifteenth generation were two sons born, and those two sons fathered six sons, and the six sons fathered many sons, only then did the clan grow numerous. To claim that the later proliferation was the merit of this tomb is rather far-fetched.