Although many an unsolved mystery like the lighting problem still lingers concerning the grottoes' detailed building process, when the experts shift their attention to larger problems encountered during the building, they are even more amazed by even more unbelievable wonders.

The already-discovered 24 caves are distributed in Shiyanbei Village in an area of only one square kilometer. Considering such a high density, one cannot help asking whether some grottoes were meant to be together, or whether some grottoes were linked together because of basic error in the primary design.

Five of the grottoes have already been pumped out and their structures are basically the same. Although the space between the grottoes is very close, the thin walls between them were kept intentionally by the ancients. After the stilts of the No. 2 and No. 6 grottoes were cleared out, the archeologists surprisingly found that the wall between the two grottoes was only 50 centimeters (cm) thick. Without prior layout, is it possible to maintain 50-cm wall in a vast area with such precision?

"At the bottom of each cave, the ancient sinkers wouldn't be able to see what the others were doing in the next grotto. But the inside of each cave had to be parallel with that of the other, or else the wall would be holed through. Thus the measure apparatus should have been very advanced. There must have been some layout about the sizes, locations, and the distances between the caves beforehand," said Yang Hongxun, an expert at the Archeological Institute of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"The caves are very close to each other, but they were never linked. The underground structure and the granite mechanics both guaranteed that the wall could be dug through," adds Sun Jun, one the founders of "Underground Structural Engineering Dynamics".

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