MessageToEagle.com – Fascinating and mysterious underground Longyou Grottoes must have been some kind of secret man-made project of the ancient skilled builders, who created them more than 2000 years ago.
They have long been the subject of great fascination for both scholars and laymen alike.
Unfortunately, there is no historical record of their construction and their builders remain anonymous.
Did the ancient builders have plans and methods to design and construct the caverns integrate and stable more than 2000 years ago?
If not, the question remains, why have these structures been able to maintain the stability for so long?
Were the grottoes really created by ancient Chinese?
Or was an unknown very advanced civilization present in the region at that time, which helped to construct the Longyou Grottoes, a riddle we are not able to solve?
Discovered after pumping water out of five small pools on a rough-flat ground in 1992, the Longyou Grottoes remain an unsolved enigma to this day.
Many researchers from China, Japan, Poland, Singapore and USA have visited and studied the Longyou Grottoes, located in the Phoenix foothills, 3 km north away from Longyou County in the midwest of East China’s Zhejiang Province.
The areas of grottoes differ from 1,000 to 3,000 square meters. Each grotto makes a downward vertical extension from the rectangular hole with a height of approximately 30 meters.
The walls, roof, and stone columns of each of the grottoes are decorated with chisel marks – lines and symbols – probably deliberately left by the ancients.
Do these symbols have only ornamental purpose, or are there a hidden message within the walls that has yet to be deciphered?
Among twenty four discovered grottoes – all of which were carved by hand – there are seven, of which distribution pattern clearly resembles the seven stars of the Big Dipper.
None of the caves are connected with each other, but many of them share thin walls. And as Yang Hongxun, an expert at the Archaeological Institute of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explained:
“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.”
There are many questions to be answered and a number of puzzles to be revealed.
Where was the excavated rock from the grottoes transported?
How many workers were involved in creation of these extremely sophisticated grottoes? One simple estimation clearly gives us an idea about how magnificent work was done by the ancients.
The four caves, for example, cover an average floor surface of 1,200 square meters, so each of the caves should have involved excavation of 36,000 cubic meters of stone.
Since a total of 24 such caves have already been found in Shiyanbei Village, the overall excavation would be 900,000 cubic meters.
See also:
- Unanswered Questions Related To The Mysterious Huashan Caves
- Ancient Secrets Hidden In The Piyang Caves – Mysterious Sacred Caves Of Tibet
- Yungang Grottoes: Marvellous Treasure Of Ancient Buddhist Rock-Cut Architecture Is Now Restored
‘If one man can dig and carry out 0.5 cubic meter of stone everyday, then building these 24 caves would require 1,000 strong men to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week for about 5 years. However, this is only a conservative estimation, because the deeper the cave goes, the more difficul in excavation and transportation will be,’ according to source.
With all unresolved issues in mind, many detailed field investigations, modeling, laboratory testing have been carried out.
For now, experts propose one theory suggesting that large rock grottoes fully filled with water can be stable and integrate for thousand years.
Other issues have to wait because the modern rock mechanics and rock engineering are younger than 100 years and have never been involved in construction of large caverns.
More on rock mechanics and rock engineering.
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