If these grottoes were not designed for the living, then is it possible that they were built for the dead? Because the building of the mausoleums only considers the magnificence, but not the living conditions.

A number of small states once thrived in Longyou region in history. The excavations from the local museum and historical records both show that stone grotto mausoleums were once very popular in the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD). Then are the Longyou Grottoes actually the tombs of the Longyou Emperor during the Han Dynasty?

In the local museum, experts found a piece of important information from an ancient painting, which says that in the region there was a king named Xu Yangwang during the Han Dynasty, who once did some large-scale construction for his tomb. So the experts tried to look for King Xu's stele in the museum's stele collection through the ages. Very fortunately, they found a half shrine stele of the King, which read, "After the King died, his subjects began to name the hill Xu Hill where he was buried, and dug stone grottoes to rest him."

This epigraph greatly encouraged the experts. However, the experts have not found any relics nor any writings and pictures that would ascertain the relationship between the Longyou Grottoes and the King Xu in the caves that have already been pumped out.

Later, the experts found some pottery fragments in a newly pumped grotto, but the scarce information is still not enough to conduct any further investigation.

In addition, the mausoleums in the Han Dynasty mostly have corridors and more than one room. Meanwhile, the funeral objects of the Han Dynasty are usually very luxurious. For instance, the Mausoleum of the Emperor of the Chu State in Xuzhou of East China's Jiangsu Province, boasts of jade clothes sewn with golden threads and plenty of porcelains. Then have the funeral objects in Longyou Grottoes already been stolen, or were they stored in other uncultivated caves? Or in another case, the Longyou Grottoes were not mausoleums at all.

The discovery of the Longyou Grottoes has attracted many experts from different disciplines to investigate. But each of the suppositions of a quarry, storehouse, cave dwelling and mausoleum has its own inexplicable drawbacks. Yang Hongxun, a seasoned expert from the Archeology Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences who has found reasonable explanations for many mysterious ancient buildings, remains perplexed about the Longyou Grottoes after much pondering.

(Author: Jeff)

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