Rock pillars
Holding up the ceilings.
Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 4.0
A group of twenty-four huge caverns carved by hand into sandstone on the bank of the Qu River, unknown until June 1992, when four farmers drained five small ponds in their village and found them to be vast water-filled caves; nineteen more caverns were then found nearby. They are more than two thousand years old, as pottery shards of the Han dynasty turned up in their silt, yet no history book mentions them, so no one knows who carved them or why. The average cave has a floor of more than a thousand square metres and ceilings up to thirty metres high, its walls, ceilings and pillars covered in neat parallel bands of chisel marks, and although the caves lie close together, no passage links them. Visitors enter several of the lit caves and walk down stairways between the massive rock pillars the carvers left to hold up the ceilings. Tickets cost CNY 65, or 35 for children between 1.2 and 1.5 metres, students and over-70s, and it is open from 8 am to 4.30 pm, per visitor guides.
Holding up the ceilings.
In parallel bands.
That hid the caves.
Fenghuang Hill on the Qu River, Longyou County, north-east of Quzhou, Zhejiang
No one knows: the caves are more than two thousand years old and no historical record mentions them, and researchers still disagree about their purpose.