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