Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right. And you cobbled this together. And this is
about the long U caves.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
I think cobbled is generous here.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
No, it's fine. These caves in China, specifically the how
would you pronounce that, Josh, The province, yeah, Jiujiang, the
Jujiang province in China where in the early nineties and
nineteen ninety two, specifically, the people that lived in the
villages near these ponds. There's ponds all over the place there. Yeah,
(00:46):
but they are all these sort of historical rumors of
some of them being bottomless, these bottomless ponds 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
(01:09):
fish in one, but I think that's not true because
part of the thing about these ponds is that they
had no fish.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, that they were totally devoid of life.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
But I saw two different things that he caught this
giant fish and was intrigued, but I just think that's
made up. Bs.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
There really is. It's surprisingly hard to get a lot
of stuff on this. So anyway, he was intrigued and said,
I'm going to buy a water pump and I'm going
to drain that thing. And as the story goes, they
ended up investing as a village into several more water
pumps and after seventeen days of pumping, drained this thing
(01:52):
to see if it was in fact a bottomless pond.
What did they find.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
They found not just in that one pod, but five ponds,
really deep caverns that you'd be like, oh, okay, that's
kind of a neat thing to find a cavern that
was filled with water that everybody thought was a pond.
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
(02:20):
into the darkness.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Wh yeah, yeah, and these are this is the mystery
of the long U caves. 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, this amazing system of underwater caverns, or well
originally underwater but just underground caverns. Now, how many were
(02:45):
there in total? I think twenty four they ended up finding.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, they found twenty four of them, five major ones
and nineteen slightly smaller ones.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, one is a tourist attraction. Now maybe more that
was even hard to find out for sure, but at
least one.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
The whole thing, this whole system of what they call grottos,
of twenty four grottos covers seven and a half acres
and the biggest one has a ceiling that's one hundred
feet off of the floor. Yeah, soaring thirty meters plus.
That's a really tall cave and a really long staircase.
And also you would say, well, wait a minute, how
(03:21):
is this thing even being held up? My friend? They
carved 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.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Do you carve a pillar or do you carve everything?
Around what will eventually be a pillar.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
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, you know, David beneath or
something like that. So yeah, I mean, just what a
great way of looking at things.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
He stared at it, and he could just see that flaccid.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Penis right, he could hear.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
All right, So let's talk a little bit more about
these because when you walk down those steps, you're gonna
find those pillars, and then you're gonna 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.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I don't think the floor has them.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Now you will find it is made up of these
carved out parallel or I saw one sort of poo
poo or call them parallelish parallel lines that are How
wide are these things?
Speaker 1 (04:37):
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 twenty four inches wide.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
I'm talking about the ones on the walls.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
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 link, they're
generally the same.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Width, right.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
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 and to the walls themselves, the
pillars themselves, they're adorned with texture.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
That's right. And within each of these sort of carved
out lines are smaller vertical clearly like chisel marks that
are chisel at a sixty degree angle to the vertical
surface of the wall or the pillar or whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, so it's definitely human hands had a big role
in shaping these things.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
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. So first of all,
(06:17):
how old is this stuff? We should talk about that
for a second.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
That's a great question, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Well, probably about two thousand years old.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
That's the guess. And 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 Swan I think the tenth emperor of
the Han dynasty, and his reign was up to forty
(06:49):
eight BCE, so over two thousand years ago is when
these caves would have been dug.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
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 how this was done or what these things were
used for.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, the closest they could come was a poem from
the seventeenth century written by Yushun, who was writing over
fifteen hundred years after these caves were o sensibly carved,
And that's the only mention they have. And it's really weird,
like why would it not be documented by a culture
that documented everything. The other thing about it, Chuck, is
(07:39):
that it doesn't match any of the other minds quarries, grottos,
ceremonial sites, palaces. It just as it's they're their own thing.
There's one other group of grottos called the Hua Shan Grottos.
They're also build as mysterious, but supposedly they were built
(08:02):
about fifteen hundred years after the ones in long U,
the long U Caves.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
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 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
(08:30):
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 like sort of central water pool that would
collect water. Yeah, but they eventually completely filled with water.
And a lot of this still is you know, guesswork,
(08:50):
because they really just don't know much about it, but
they think that they flooded over time because these drains
stopped working.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
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
(09:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Oh totally. And they didn't just go in there with
like the biggest tools that were available to them at
the time. They and you know, it's because we're these
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
(09:51):
when they could have used bigger things at the time.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
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 carved it out. So they're carving
this pillar over here by you know, along the way,
they were carving another pillar over here along the way,
and they just kept carving down with chisels. So there's
an estimate. I'm not sure who estimated this.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
This is all over the internet the home.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
It was worried for sure. We got it from Interesting Engineering,
so blame them. We tried to go as legit a
source as 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
(10:38):
have taken one thousand people six years if they worked
twenty four straight hours. Yeah, so that's pretty nuts because
they would have moved a million cubic meters of rock.
This didn't soil everybody. This is siltstone. It's very hard
rock that they carved into.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
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 you know, a big mountain nearby of some stacked siltstone.
There were no tools that they found. They're they're surmising
this chisel and hammer thing from how you know, like
the end result, not the fact that they found a
(11:17):
bunch of chisels and hammers down there right like after
some great flood or something. And then you mentioned the
intricate patterns there. 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, yea, and was not
(11:39):
done at the time.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Well, let's get into it, because I think we should
finish on skepticism, shall we shall?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
We shall?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
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 and shockingly good condition, having been underwater for centuries,
and skeptical sources say, probably it's because it was carved
(12:09):
after these things were drained in the nineties 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 thirty years. Yeah, And
it's just a misunderstanding. So when you learn about that,
it starts to make you a question, Well, okay, what
else is just misunderstanding? What else is just the tourist
(12:33):
board in China saying something and we're not quite getting it,
and we think that this is a mystery more than it.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
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,
(13:01):
because some people have 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.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Probably no, they would have needed garrisons like much more quickly.
You don't, you know, it's not something that you would take,
you know, six years, using one thousand people for twenty
four hours a day.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
It's a heck of a foxhole.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
You exactly right.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
I did see one video of this woman online put
forward the idea that it's sort of like an Okham's
razor thing. Wait is Okham's razor. Yeah, that's the simplest explanation, right, Yeah, yeah,
they were cisterns, and she had a lot of compelling
(13:57):
reasons why she thinks they were sistern uh. And a
lot of people in the comments this is.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
YouTube, of course, they're like, I'm gonna kill your family.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Now. A lot of people are like, that actually makes
a lot of sense. And she compared them to different
cisterns at other places in the world that kind of
had some similar looks, and that, you know, they they
functioned well as cisterns because they collected a ton of
water that they had still been using for fresh water.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
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?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah? Maybe, but I don't know that. I think there
are some things that don't quite hold water.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Well no, oh boy, chuck. 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 cistern?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
That's a great time.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
So from what we can tell, there is a pretty
decent amount of mystery to the Long UK's it's not
just misunderstanding.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, and I don't think we're probably ever going to
find out for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
So Chuck, what do you think about the idea that
they were cisterns?
Speaker 2 (15:07):
I think it doesn't hold water.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Beautiful Short Stuff is apt.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
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