RFI: the very amazing and surprising man-made LONGYOU CAVES in zhejiang province in china

so i want ilxors who know more about the following — who have perhaps even visited! — to expand and explain: they are also know as the xiaonanhai stone chambers (小南海石室)

so some time in the very 90s, a villager (who never seems to be named) of shiyan beicun on the qu river in longyou county in quzhou prefecture decided that the puzzle of the local ponds could no longer be born in the modern era. since time immemorial they had been said to be “fathomless” — well he was a modern farmer (possibly) and hence very scientific and such things had to be nonsense. so he persuaded a group of fellow farmers to pitch in to buy a device that pump the water out of the nearest pond

(i shd add here that the terms “village” and "pond” give off kind of a midsomer duckpond-on-the-green vibe but actually these “ponds” are more like pools in a ruggedly hilly and bewooded sandstone landscape — and photos on the tourist site give no sense of what they looked like before the farmers took action)

what they found was not “fathomless", but it was deep and surprising: a wide shaft that went down around 100 feet and then opened up into a cavern which had very clearly been extremely worked by hand, because it was large and high and smooth, with passages and platforms and nice flat floors and pillars and bridges ffs (lol khazad dûm), plus many high-quality carvings and as texture chiselled striations everywhere on walls and ceilings…

further investigation after 1992 revealed relics and artefacts in the mud on the floor from a period that meant the caves must be at least 2000 years old — and that NO MENTION was to be found in documentation of any era, as to who had done this or why. in the 30-odd ears since 1992, 24 such caves have been found, sometimes extremely near neighbours (walls between them only a few feet thick, but skilfully not punctured) and half a dozen fully drained. there is a now a thriving tourist complex allowing access (some pictures below)

https://youimg1.tripcdn.com/target/010081200085ccpk4876A.jpg

https://www.theancientconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/underground51_05.jpg

https://www.topchinatravel.com/pic/city/hangzhou/attractions/longyou-grottoes-01.jpg

I can’t even.

an undrained longyou pond (tho possibly in fact slightly drained)

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1674775515300950-gr3.jpg

(from a paper explaining that being full of water is likely why they've survived for such a long time in such good condition)

Which also seems to say that now that they are unwatered, they are experiencing deterioration.

yes 😔

tho i guess as many as 18 have not been drained so this is not a flat-out catastrophe yet

i tried watching some youtubes abt the whole thing: visually they give a pleasing sense of the space (and the sound of many echoing tourists visiting them) but on the other hand the yutuber narrators were uniformly fuck-awful and given to claims that clashed with wikipedia with giving their sources (i mean possibly the on-site brochure but say so please)

somehow nice to know that they are free to visit! i hope the farmers' lives are improved and not in fact wrecked by their startling discovery

These are incredible but the dating seems highly speculative - [researchers found] typical clay pots in the Western Han Dynasty of China from 206 B.C. to 23 A.D. Based on the assumption that they were put into the cavern No.2 two thousand years ago... !! (from the paper above) - some of the buddhist carvings would surely date it later than 2000 years ago: The presence of the female Buddhist icon Guan Yin would suggest the caves are newer. Buddhism was first recorded during the Eastern Han Dynasty during the 1st Century AD, but, the female form didn’t appear in China until the 12th Century AD. (https://www.thegypsythread.org/longyou-caves-another-ancient-unsolved-mystery/)

Either way, fascinating and weird that there's no record of their construction.

(loads of pics on google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/b8ivnnXNoefZs2e98 )

yes you have to take quite a lot on trust about the quoted science -- not that china is bad at science or archeology or its own history and historiagraphy or whatever, quite the opposite, just that the stated conclusions here are being filtered through a very touristy lens online

This thread was a nice read on a tiring Monday morning.

otm

i wanted updates on the longyou caverns! we are none of us getting any younger!

we are none of us paying enough mind to the xiaonanhai stone chambers (小南海石室)!!

here is a close-up of the bas reliefs

https://www.theancientconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/underground51_06.jpg

l-r legolas, gimli, boromir, aragorn

i was just watching the (not-that-great) netflix doc abt the terracotta warriors and wondered if these two finds shared anything like locale or date or whatever

locale no: they are 1400 km apart
date yes!: they are both c.2000 yrs old, with items found in them from c.200+ BCE, viz. the handover between the (v short but important) Qin and the Western Han dynasties

i am sure others more knowledgeable than me abt china (= everyone) can fill in the gaps here