In June 1992 four farmers in Zhejiang drained five village ponds and found they were not ponds. Underneath were 24 hand-cut sandstone caverns, each averaging over 1,000 square metres of floor with ceilings up to 30 metres, more than 30,000 square metres in total. The walls carry parallel bands about 60 cm wide of chisel marks set at about 60 degrees, uniform throughout, which is an enormous amount of deliberate work. Pottery found inside dates between 206 BC and AD 23, so they are over two thousand years old. Nobody knows what they were for and not one historical document mentions them, which for China is remarkable in itself. The oddest detail: despite sitting side by side they have no connecting passages, though cutting one would have been trivial. Fenghuang Hill, Longyou County.
Longyou, Zhejiang, China
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