The villages of Longyou County, in Zhejiang
province, China, have long been renowned for their scatted ponds of
extraordinary depth, which have become over the centuries wellsprings of
myth and folklore and which are often collectively called the
“Bottomless Ponds,” said to stretch infinitely down into the bowels of
the earth. It was at one such pond that in 1992 a local farmer by the
name of Wu Anai, from the village of Shiyan Beicun, got it into his head
to see how true the legends were, and how deep the pond near his own
village really was. To this end he went about gathering up a powerful
water pump to actually begin emptying the pond. What he found in the
“Bottomless Pond” would astound everyone who saw it, become known as the
“‘the ninth wonder of the ancient world,” and launch an intriguing
historical mystery that has never been solved.
As the water was laboriously siphoned out, a process that took days,
it became apparent that this was no normal, naturally made pond, but
rather an immense, underground cavern system that seemed to be manmade,
carved right into the sandstone beneath them and inundated with water.
The cave sprawled out beneath them was fully equipped with stone rooms,
pillars, all decorated with cryptic lines and symbols that have been
meticulously etched into the stone and with meanings unknown. This
discovery soon had other nearby villages draining their own ponds, until
over the years 36 similar grottoes were unearthed, all within an area
of just one square kilometer. They penetrate down into the earth for 100
feet or more, each an average of 11,000 sq. ft. in area, and although
not connected they are often separated only by very thin walls, and were
obviously made by the same builders. Despite being examined by numerous
experts and scientists, no one has any more understanding of them they
did back when that first cave was discovered, and their mysteries are
deep.
One of the Bottomless Ponds
Perhaps the biggest mystery of what have come to be called the
Longyou Caves is that no one really knows who built them, why, or how.
They have been estimated as dating back to perhaps 200 BC, but there is
absolutely no record of their construction in any of the historical
records, nor even any reference to their existence, and so that is about
all we know. The purpose of the caves is equally evasive, with no
artifacts to show that they were used as tombs, no signs of any mining
having been done, and there are no traces of anyone ever having
inhabited them. They are just there, their meaning for existing just as
inscrutable as the identity of their creators. All that can be known is
that these caves took an enormous amount of manpower and time to create,
so they must have been important for something to justify such a
massive and ambitious project.
Just as perplexing is the mystery of how they were built. In total,
it is estimated that around 1,000,000 cubic meters of rock and dirt
would have had to be removed, which would have taken around 1,000
workers working 6 years straight, laboring day and night to accomplish,
and yet there is no mention of any such project underway in the historic
records, nor any clue as to where all of that rock went. Then there is
the remarkable precision in the workmanship and the way the caves are so
incredibly symmetrical and accurately laid out. Interestingly, the
caves are all very similarly designed and laid out, with indeed some of
the caves almost identical to each other, so how did they do that
without any modern equipment? One Yang Hongxun, an expert at the
Archaeological Institute of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has said
of this:
At the bottom of each cave, the ancient builders wouldn’t
be able to see what the others were doing in the next grotto. But the
inside of each cave had to be parallel with that of the other, or else
the wall would be holed through. Thus the measure apparatus should have
been very advanced. There must have been some layout about the sizes,
locations, and the distances between the caves beforehand.
This is not to mention that it is uncertain even what tools the
builders used, with no signs of any tools and no hints as to how these
caves were dug. Also odd is the strange presence of numerous tiny chisel
marks along the walls that are so symmetrical and uniform to look
almost as if they were produced by some sort of machine, and which would
have taken a mind-boggling amount of work to meticulously etch by hand.
Their significance, of course, is just as enigmatic as anything else
about this place. Adding to all of this is that the builders would have
had to have done this down in the dark, yet there is no evidence of
torches having been used, nor any other source of light, so how could
they see down there in the eternal gloom? However they did all of this,
it is a remarkable feat of engineering and made even more so by how
incredibly well-preserved the caves are. Considering that they are
thousands of years old, one would expect that there would be some
collapses or signs of wear or damage, yet there are none and the caves
are remarkably pristine.
Although they have been studied by scientists and a few are even open
to tourism, no one has ever been able to figure out all of the pieces
to the mystery of the Longyou Caves. We don’t know who built them, how
they did it, or why. They are a complete enigma, buried down there
underwater for millennia with their secrets long gone with those who
crafted them. In the void of any new findings on the mysterious
complexes it is quite likely that we will never get the answers we seek,
and that these caves will continue to remain curious anomalies flitting
out past our understanding.
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