The Twenty-Four Halls Nobody Recorded: China's Longyou Grottoes

2026-08-12 · Lieux enigmatiques · 8 min de lecture

In the village of Shiyan Beicun, on the bank of the Qu River in Longyou County, Zhejiang Province, there were ponds that everybody treated as a feature of the landscape. They were dark, unusually cold, and reputed locally to be bottomless. Nobody swam in them. Nobody drained them. For as long as anyone in the village could remember they had simply been there, and no one had thought to ask what lay underneath the water.

In June 1992 four villagers decided to find out. They pooled their money, hired water pumps and began emptying one of the pools. The work went on for days, the water level dropping steadily, and what finally emerged from beneath it was not a muddy basin with a floor of silt and weed. It was a chamber cut into solid rock. The ceiling sloped away into darkness. The floor descended as a broad ramp. Every surface, from the roof to the base of the walls, was covered in tool marks. The pond had not been a pond at all. It was the flooded roof opening of a hall carved out of the hillside by human hands.

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