Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Longyou Caves

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

What’s better than discovering a mysterious cavern? Discovering five!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know, we speak things into existence here on the old calm down podcast. Isn't that right Aaron Taylor? I don't know what you are doing in your life right now besides rocking the United States, but I will say this. Please try our friend Travis. He is fantastic. If anyone needs to calm down, admittedly, it's us, but knowing us, we probably won't. So make sure you listen to the Calm Down podcast every week. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.

Dave's here in spirit. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi. So let's get started That's right and you cobbled this together and this is about the long you caves. I think cobbled is generous here No, it's fine these caves in China specifically the How would you pronounce that, Josh? The province? Yeah.

Jujiang. The Jujiang province in China, where in the early 90s and 1992, specifically, the people that lived in the villages near these ponds, there's ponds all over the place there. But there, all these sort of historical rumors of some of them being bottomless, these bottomless pawns, kind of Chinese lore. And one day, this guy, and actually found his name, and now I can't find it, his name was Wu, I do know that. But he said, you know what, I'm going to find out what's going on. I saw some places say that he caught this enormous fish in one But I think that's not true because part of the thing about these ponds is that they had no fish

Yeah, that they were totally devoid of life But I saw two different things that he caught this giant fish and was intrigued, but I just think that's made up BS Okay, that's great that you laid that out there because we should probably say there's a lot of questions about all of this. There really is. It's surprisingly hard to get a lot of stuff on this. So anyway, he was intrigued and said, I'm gonna buy a water pump and I'm gonna drain that thing.

And as the story goes, they ended up investing as a village into several more water pumps. And after 17 days of pumping drained this thing to see if it was in fact a bottomless pond, what did they find? They found, not just in that one pond, but five ponds really deep caverns that you be like, okay, that's kind of a neat thing to find a cavern that was filled with water that everybody thought was upon. But wait, all you had to do was peer over the surface into this cavern and you would see a staircase that had been carved into the rock descending below into the darkness.

What? Yeah. Yeah, and these are the, this is the mystery of the long UKVs because they still don't know, and this is what we'll talk about, you know, probably in part two, they still don't know why these things were built. These, this amazing system of underwater caverns, or, well, originally underwater, but just underground caverns now. How many were there in total? I think 24 they ended up finding? Yeah, they found 24 of them,

five major ones and 19 slightly smaller ones. Yeah, one is a tourist attraction now, maybe more. That was even hard to find out. For sure. But at least one. And the whole thing, this whole system of what they call grottoes of 24 grottoes covers seven and a half acres. And the biggest one has a ceiling that's a hundred feet off of the

floor. Yeah, soaring 30 meters plus. That's a really tall cave and a really long staircase and also you would say, well wait a minute, how is this thing even being held up? My friend, the carp pillars that held this thing up and that's just the very beginning of all the astounding stuff that there is to say about these caves. Do you carve a pillar or do you carve everything around what will eventually be a pillar? They say that, I think Michelangelo saw

like in a slab of marble, like raw marble, what he was supposed to chip away to reveal David Benith, David beneath or something like that. So, I mean, just what a great way of looking at things. He stared at it and he could just see that flasad penis. Right. He could hear, woo woo woo.

All right. So, let's talk a little bit more about these because when you walk down those steps, you're going to find those pillars and then you're going to look around at these walls, and you're gonna be like, hold on a second. If I look at all these walls, I will notice, and the ceilings, mind you, like basically all of the surface, except for the floor, right? I don't think the floor has them now. You will find it is made up of these carved out parallel, or I saw one sort of poo pooer called them parallelish, parallel lines that are, how wide are these things? Well, it depends.

So if you're talking about the parallel lines that go, that circle all the way down a pillar, they're usually about 24 inches wide. I'm talking about the ones on the walls. They vary in length. Okay, or width? Both. Okay. But they'll vary in width from like say this wall

to that wall. In a local area, they're all going in generally the same direction, they're generally the same length, they're generally the same width. Right. But when you put it all together, it has this amazing effect of creating a uniform textured background to everything that's on these walls.

Into the walls themselves, the pillars themselves, they're adorned with texture. That's right. And within each of these carved out lines are smaller vertical, clearly like chisel marks, that are chisel at a 60 degree angle to the vertical surface of the wall or the pillar or whatever it is. So there's definitely human hands had a big role in shaping these things. Lots and lots of human hands, and I guess we can take a break now, and we'll talk about all this other good stuff right after this. I'm Miles Taylor and I've been called a lot of things. A coward, a patriot, a traitor, a hero, a sleaze bag, and a deep-state hack.

Before I was any of those, I was chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump. I got those new titles after I blew the whistle about presidential misconduct. I want to tell you about a show that I'm hosting that tells the stories of the high-ranking officials and frontline public servants who risked everything to tell the truth. In my podcast, The Whistleblowers, Inside the Trump Administration, I'll take you into the lives of the people who tried to sound the alarm from within one of the most turbulent presidential administrations in history. So, I hope you'll take a listen. Hear the personal side of a political story. One that's as important

now as it was the day each of us came forward. Maybe more. All episodes of The Whistleblowers are available to binge now on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What is this place? Wait, why my handcuffed? What am I doing here? 13 days of Halloween penance. Season four of the award-winning horror fiction podcast presented in immersive 3D audio. Where am I? Why, this is the Pendleton. All residents, please return to your habitations. Light stuff on your feet! You're new here, so I'll say it once.

No talking. Starring Natalie Morales of Parks and Recreation and Dead to Me. Am I under arrest? We don't like to use that word. Can I leave of my own free will? Not at this time. So this is a prison name? No, it's a rehabilitation center.

Premiering October 19th, ending Halloween. I'm gonna get out. And how may I ask, or are you going to do that? Escape. Listen to 13 days of Halloween on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So first of all, how old is this stuff? We should talk about that for a second.

That's a great question, Chuck. Well, probably about 2,000 years old. That's the guess. The reason that they're saying that is that they found pottery embedded in the silt on the floor of this thing when they drained it of these caves, and that this pottery dated to about the reign of Emperor Shwan, I think the 10th Emperor of the Han Dynasty, and his reign was up to 48 BCE. So over 2,000 years ago is when these caves would have been dug.

Yeah, exactly. And another weird thing about this system is that usually you would know, because the Chinese were great about keeping records and documenting stuff like this, like exactly like this. Yeah, they have found no documentation anywhere ever about what how this was done or what these things were used for. The closest they could come was a poem from the 17th century written by Yushun who was writing over 1500 years after these cases were essentially carved. That's the only mention they have.

It's really weird. Why would it not be documented by a culture that documented everything? The other thing about it, Chuck, is that it doesn't match any of the other minds, quarries, grottoes, ceremonial sites, palaces, it just as it's their own thing. There's one other group of grottoes called the Huashan grottoes. They're also build as mysterious, but supposedly they were built about 1500 years after the ones in the long-new caves. Yeah, another couple of remarkable things is that each one of these has only one entrance, like you're talking about, that vertical shaft staircase.

So it's not like they're connected together, although they are beside one or another. They neighbor one another sometimes to the point where these walls are just a couple of feet thick between them, but you can't move from one to another while you're down there. And then once you get down there, they found that they used to have these drainage channels and ways to drain them in this sort of central water pool that would collect water. But they eventually completely filled with water and a lot of this still is, you know, guesswork because they really just don't know much about it, but they think that they flooded over time because these drains stopped working. Yeah, and clearly the people who built these were incredibly talented, because like you

said, they shared walls, and those walls, in some cases, were only two feet thick. And if you're carving out spaces independently, and you're using a shared wall, you're at a really high risk of carving into the other chamber, the other room through the wall. They didn't. They figured out that precisely how to carve the next chamber that shared the wall with the first chamber without puncturing that shared wall. That's really tough to do.

Oh, totally. And they didn't just go in there with the biggest tools that were available to them at the time. And you know, it's because for these little lines that are carved, they've basically settled on the fact that like lots and lots of people did this with pretty small tools, like chisels and hammers basically when they could have used bigger things at the time.

Yeah, I saw that they think that they actually carved from the surface of the ground downward layer by layer That that's how they they carved it out. So they're carving this pillar over here by you know along the way They're recovering another pillar over here along the way and they just kept carving down with chisels So there's a estimate. I'm not sure who estimated this. This is all over the internet. The whole thing is being worried. For sure. We got it from interesting engineering. So blame that. We tried to go as legitimate sources we could. And they said that in an estimate with tools at the time, just removing the rock, not the like intricate carving or anything like that

But just to remove the rock to create the caverns would have taken a thousand people six years if they worked 24 straight hours Yeah So that's pretty nuts because they they would have moved a million cubic meters of rock What this in soil everybody This is silt stone. It's very hard rock that they carved into. Yeah, and there's no evidence of where all that stuff went, that million cubic meters of rock, because it's not like there's a big mountain nearby,

of some stacked silt stone. There were no tools that they found. They're surmising this chisel and hammer thing from how, like the end result, not the fact that they found a bunch of chisels and amers down there, like after some great flood or something. And then you mentioned the intricate patterns. It's not just the carving and the walls and the ceilings and these pillars, but there is art down there, like bass relief carvings all over the place. And almost everywhere I found said that this is almost

certainly came much, much later and was not done at the time. Well, let's get into it because I think we should finish on skepticism, shall we? Let's shout, we shall. So some people are like that boss relief thing is a great example of questioning anything we know about this because sources, legitimate sources will be like, this boss relief is in shockingly good condition, having been underwater for centuries. And skeptical sources say, probably it's because it was carved after these things were

drained in the 90s to enhance their attraction for tourists. And that over here in the West, we're like, wow, look at that boss relief. It's like it was carved within the last 30 years. Yeah. And it's just a misunderstanding. So when you learn about that, it starts to make a question, well, okay, what else is just misunderstanding? What else is just the tourist board in China saying something and we're not quite getting it and we think that this is a mystery more than it is? Exactly, because you do have to keep that in mind like what we're talking about or where we're talking about.

There have been theories over the years of what it could have been. None of them completely make sense. If it was like a mine, it wouldn't have been, they wouldn't have taken so much time to make it so sort of precise and intricate. If it was a palace, because some people put that forward, it would have had rooms.

This is like, I don't know if we got it across. Each one is like its own just huge room. And that's not how palaces were. They had different chambers in different rooms. And another thing was, maybe it's a garrison for troops, but they wouldn't have taken so long to do something like that, probably. No, they would have needed garrisons

like much more quickly. You don't, you know, that's not something that you would take, you know, six years using 1,000 people for 24 hours a day. That's a heck of a foxhole. Two, exactly, right. I did see one video of this woman online. Put forward the idea that it's sort of like an Occam's razor thing.

Wait, is Occam's razor? Yeah, that's the simplest explanation, right? Yeah. Yeah, they's the simplest explanation, right? Yeah, yeah, they were sisters And she had a lot of compelling reasons why she thinks they were sisters And a lot of people in the comments. This is YouTube of course They're like I'm gonna kill your family No, a lot of people are like that actually makes a lot of sense and she compared them to different sisters at other places in the world that kind of had some similar looks and that, you know, they functioned well as sisters because it collected a ton of water that they had still been using for fresh water. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure the ancestors,

the ghosts were like, what are you doing when they saw the villagers pumping these things out? Yeah, maybe. But I don't know. I think there were some things that don't quite hold water. Oh, boy, check. The biggest one is, I'm sorry we didn't finish on that, but that was beautiful. The biggest one for me is, why would you make such intricate carvings in a system? I don't know.

That's a great question. No, that makes sense. So for what we can tell, there is a pretty decent amount of mystery to the long UK. It's not just misunderstanding. Yeah, and I don't think we're probably ever going to find out for sure. So Chuck, what do you think about the idea that they were sisters? I think it does an old one. Beautiful.

Short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. you