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Short Stuff: Longyou Caves · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: like Obi wan Kenobi. So let's get started.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: That's right. And you cobbled this together. And this is
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: about the long U caves.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: I think cobbled is generous here.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: No, it's fine. These caves in China, specifically the how
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: would you pronounce that, Josh, The province, yeah, Jiujiang, the
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Jujiang province in China where in the early nineties and
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two, specifically, the people that lived in the
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: villages near these ponds. There's ponds all over the place there. Yeah,
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: but they are all these sort of historical rumors of
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: some of them being bottomless, these bottomless ponds kind of
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Chinese lore. And one day this guy and actually found
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: his name, and now I can't find it. His name
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: was Wu, I do know that. But he said, you
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: know what, I'm going to find out what's going on.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: I saw some places say that he caught this enormous
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: fish in one, but I think that's not true because
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: part of the thing about these ponds is that they
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: had no fish.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that they were totally devoid of life.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: But I saw two different things that he caught this
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: giant fish and was intrigued, but I just think that's
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: made up. Bs.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's great that you laid that out there, because
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: we should probably say there's a lot of questions about
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: all of this.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: There really is. It's surprisingly hard to get a lot
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: of stuff on this. So anyway, he was intrigued and said,
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: I'm going to buy a water pump and I'm going
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: to drain that thing. And as the story goes, they
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: ended up investing as a village into several more water
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: pumps and after seventeen days of pumping, drained this thing
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: to see if it was in fact a bottomless pond.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: What did they find.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: They found not just in that one pod, but five ponds,
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: really deep caverns that you'd be like, oh, okay, that's
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: kind of a neat thing to find a cavern that
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: was filled with water that everybody thought was a pond.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: But wait, all you had to do was peer over
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: the surface into this cavern and you would see a
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: staircase that had been carved into the rock descending below
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: into the darkness.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: Wh yeah, yeah, and these are this is the mystery
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: of the long U caves. Because they still don't know,
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: and this is what we'll talk about, you know, probably
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: in part two. They still don't know why these things
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: were built, this amazing system of underwater caverns, or well
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: originally underwater but just underground caverns. Now, how many were
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: there in total? I think twenty four they ended up finding.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they found twenty four of them, five major ones
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: and nineteen slightly smaller ones.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, one is a tourist attraction. Now maybe more that
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: was even hard to find out for sure, but at
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: least one.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: The whole thing, this whole system of what they call grottos,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: of twenty four grottos covers seven and a half acres
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: and the biggest one has a ceiling that's one hundred
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: feet off of the floor. Yeah, soaring thirty meters plus.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: That's a really tall cave and a really long staircase.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: And also you would say, well, wait a minute, how
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: is this thing even being held up? My friend? They
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: carved pillars that held this thing up. And that's just
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: the very beginning of all the astounding stuff that there
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: is to say about these caves.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: Do you carve a pillar or do you carve everything?
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Around what will eventually be a pillar.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: They say that, I think Michelangelo saw, like in a
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: slab of marble, like raw marble, what he was supposed
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: to chip away to reveal, you know, David beneath or
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: something like that. So yeah, I mean, just what a
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: great way of looking at things.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: He stared at it, and he could just see that flaccid.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Penis right, he could hear.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: All right, So let's talk a little bit more about
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: these because when you walk down those steps, you're gonna
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: find those pillars, and then you're gonna look around at
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: these walls and you're gonna be like, hold on a second.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: If I look at all these walls, I will notice
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: and the ceilings, mind you, like basically all of the
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: surface except for the floor, right.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: I don't think the floor has them.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: Now you will find it is made up of these
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: carved out parallel or I saw one sort of poo
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: poo or call them parallelish parallel lines that are How
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: wide are these things?
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Well, it depends. So if you're talking about the parallel
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: lines that go that circle all the way down a pillar,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: they're usually about twenty four inches wide.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about the ones on the walls.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: They vary in length okay, or width both okay, but
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: they'll vary in width from like say, this wall to
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: that wall in a local area. They're all going in
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: generally the same direction, they're generally the same link, they're
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: generally the same.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: Width, right.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: But when you put it all together, it has this
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: amazing effect of creating a uniform textured background to everything
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: that's on these walls and to the walls themselves, the
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: pillars themselves, they're adorned with texture.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: That's right. And within each of these sort of carved
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: out lines are smaller vertical clearly like chisel marks that
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: are chisel at a sixty degree angle to the vertical
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: surface of the wall or the pillar or whatever it is.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's definitely human hands had a big role
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: in shaping these things.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: Lots and lots of human hands. And I guess we
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: can take a break now and we'll talk about all
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: this other good stuff right after this. So first of all,
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: how old is this stuff? We should talk about that
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: for a second.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: That's a great question, Chuck.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: Well, probably about two thousand years old.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: That's the guess. And the reason that they're saying that
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: is that they found pottery embedded in the silt on
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: the floor of this thing when they drained it of
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: these caves, and that this pottery dated to about the
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: reign of Emperor Swan I think the tenth emperor of
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: the Han dynasty, and his reign was up to forty
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: eight BCE, so over two thousand years ago is when
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: these caves would have been dug.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And another weird thing about this system is
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: that usually you would know because the Chinese were great
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: about keeping records and documenting stuff like this, like exactly
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: like this. Yeah, they have found no documentation anywhere ever
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: about how this was done or what these things were
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: used for.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the closest they could come was a poem from
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: the seventeenth century written by Yushun, who was writing over
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: fifteen hundred years after these caves were o sensibly carved,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: And that's the only mention they have. And it's really weird,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: like why would it not be documented by a culture
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: that documented everything. The other thing about it, Chuck, is
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: that it doesn't match any of the other minds quarries, grottos,
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: ceremonial sites, palaces. It just as it's they're their own thing.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: There's one other group of grottos called the Hua Shan Grottos.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: They're also build as mysterious, but supposedly they were built
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: about fifteen hundred years after the ones in long U,
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: the long U Caves.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, another couple of remarkable things is that each one
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: of these has only one entrance, like you're talking about
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: that vertical shaft staircase. So it's not like they're connected together.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Although they are beside one another, they neighbor one another,
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: sometimes to the point where these walls are just a
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: couple of feet thick between them, but you can't move
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: from one to another while you're down there. And then
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: once you get down there, they found that they used
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: to have these drainage channels and ways to drain them
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: in this like sort of central water pool that would
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: collect water. Yeah, but they eventually completely filled with water.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: And a lot of this still is you know, guesswork,
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: because they really just don't know much about it, but
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: they think that they flooded over time because these drains
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: stopped working.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and clearly the people who built these were incredibly talented, because,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: like you said, they shared walls, and those walls in
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: some cases were only two feet thick, and if you're
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: carving out spaces independently and you're using a shared wall,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: you're at a really high risk of carving into the
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: other chamber, the other room through the wall. They didn't
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: they figured out that precisely how to carve the next
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: chamber that shared the wall with the first chamber without
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: puncturing that shared wall. That's really tough to do.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Oh totally. And they didn't just go in there with
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: like the biggest tools that were available to them at
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: the time. They and you know, it's because we're these
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: these little lines that are carved. They've basically settled on
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: the fact that like lots and lots of people did
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: this with pretty small tools like chisels and hammers, basically
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: when they could have used bigger things at the time.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw that they think that they actually carved
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: from the surface of the ground downward, layer by layer,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: that that's how they carved it out. So they're carving
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: this pillar over here by you know, along the way,
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: they were carving another pillar over here along the way,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: and they just kept carving down with chisels. So there's
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: an estimate. I'm not sure who estimated this.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: This is all over the internet the home.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: It was worried for sure. We got it from Interesting Engineering,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: so blame them. We tried to go as legit a
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: source as we could, and they said that in an
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: estimate with tools at the time, just removing the rock,
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: not the like intricate carving or anything like that, but
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: just to remove the rock to create the caverns would
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: have taken one thousand people six years if they worked
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: twenty four straight hours. Yeah, so that's pretty nuts because
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: they would have moved a million cubic meters of rock.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: This didn't soil everybody. This is siltstone. It's very hard
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: rock that they carved into.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's no evidence of where all that stuff went,
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: that million cubic meters of rock, because it's not like
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: there's you know, a big mountain nearby of some stacked siltstone.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: There were no tools that they found. They're they're surmising
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: this chisel and hammer thing from how you know, like
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: the end result, not the fact that they found a
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: bunch of chisels and hammers down there right like after
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: some great flood or something. And then you mentioned the
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: intricate patterns there. It's not just the carving and the
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: walls and the ceilings and these pillars. But there is
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: art down there, like bass relief carvings all over the
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: place and almost everywhere I found said that this is
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: almost certainly came much much later, yea, and was not
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: done at the time.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Well, let's get into it, because I think we should
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: finish on skepticism, shall we shall?
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: We shall?
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: So some people are like that boss relief thing is
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: a great example of questioning anything we know about this
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: because sources, legitimate sources will be like, this boss relief
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: is and shockingly good condition, having been underwater for centuries,
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: and skeptical sources say, probably it's because it was carved
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: after these things were drained in the nineties to enhance
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: their attraction for tourists, and that over here in the West,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: we're like, wow, look at that boss relief. It's like
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: it was carved within the last thirty years. Yeah, And
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: it's just a misunderstanding. So when you learn about that,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: it starts to make you a question, Well, okay, what
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: else is just misunderstanding? What else is just the tourist
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: board in China saying something and we're not quite getting it,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: and we think that this is a mystery more than it.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: Is exactly because you do have to keep that in mind,
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: like what we're talking about or where we're talking about.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: There have been theories over the years of what it
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: could have been. None of them completely make sense. If
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: it was like a mine, it wouldn't have been they
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: wouldn't have taken so much time to make it so
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: sort of precise and intricate. If it was a palace,
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: because some people have put that forward, it would have
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: had rooms. This is like, I don't know if we
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: got it across. Each one is like its own just
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: huge room. And that's not how palaces were. They had
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: different chambers in different rooms. And another thing was maybe
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: it's a garrison for troops, but they wouldn't have taken
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: so long to do something like that.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Probably no, they would have needed garrisons like much more quickly.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: You don't, you know, it's not something that you would take,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: you know, six years, using one thousand people for twenty
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: four hours a day.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: It's a heck of a foxhole.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: You exactly right.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: I did see one video of this woman online put
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: forward the idea that it's sort of like an Okham's
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: razor thing. Wait is Okham's razor. Yeah, that's the simplest explanation, right, Yeah, yeah,
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: they were cisterns, and she had a lot of compelling
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: reasons why she thinks they were sistern uh. And a
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: lot of people in the comments this is.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: YouTube, of course, they're like, I'm gonna kill your family.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: Now. A lot of people are like, that actually makes
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: a lot of sense. And she compared them to different
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: cisterns at other places in the world that kind of
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: had some similar looks, and that, you know, they they
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: functioned well as cisterns because they collected a ton of
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: water that they had still been using for fresh water.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And I'm sure the ancestors the ghosts were like,
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: what are you doing when they saw the villagers pumping
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: these things out?
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Maybe, but I don't know that. I think there
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: are some things that don't quite hold water.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Well no, oh boy, chuck. The biggest one is I'm
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: sorry we didn't finish on that, but that was beautiful.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: The biggest one for me is why would you make
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: such intricate carvings in a cistern?
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: That's a great time.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: That makes sense.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: So from what we can tell, there is a pretty
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: decent amount of mystery to the Long UK's it's not
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: just misunderstanding.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don't think we're probably ever going to
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: find out for sure.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: So Chuck, what do you think about the idea that
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: they were cisterns?
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: I think it doesn't hold water.
• 15:09
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