Things to find in China
14 legends, 1 cave, 1 gem & mineral ground on the free Club 49 adventure map
What the map holds here
- Chinese Hetian jade Gem & mineral ground
For four thousand years Chinese civilization prized jade above gold, and the finest, the “mutton-fat” white nephrite, came from the rivers around Hotan in Xinjiang, where boulders were gathered from the riverbeds as the meltwater...
Open it on the map - Hukou Waterfall Legend
The Yellow River runs about 30 metres wide here, 50 in flood, and then the hills close on both sides and squeeze it to 20 or 30 before it drops more than 20 metres off a lip of rock. The name means flask mouth, or kettle mouth,...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Jiuzhaigou Legend
A valley of lakes in northern Sichuan so blue and so clear that photographs of it are routinely assumed to be faked. They are not: the lakes were made by glaciers and by natural damming, and the colour is carbonate deposition,...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Kashgar Legend
One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, sitting in the Tarim Basin near the borders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and for more than two thousand years the place where the Silk Road put itself back together....
Open it on the map · Read the story - Reed Flute Cave, Guilin Cave
Two hundred and forty metres of limestone under the Guilin karst, three entrances you can walk in through, and formations that have been named for centuries: the Crystal Palace, Fish Tail Peak, the Dragon Pagoda. One giant...
Open it on the map - The Hanging Temple of Hengshan Legend
A monastery pinned to a cliff face 75 metres above the canyon floor in Shanxi, begun around 491 by a monk called Liaoran under the Northern Wei, which makes it over 1,500 years old. The wooden poles you can see underneath it are...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Leshan Giant Buddha Legend
Seventy-one metres of Buddha cut into a red sandstone cliff where the Min and the Dadu rivers meet, the largest stone Buddha in the world, begun in 722 and finished in 803. A monk named Hai Tong started it because boats were...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Longmen Grottoes Legend
Around 100,000 Buddhist figures in something between 1,400 and 2,300 caves cut into the cliffs 12 km south of Luoyang, ranging from an inch high to 57 feet, carved from 493 to 1127 across four phases: the Northern Wei to 534, a...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Longyou Caves Legend
In June 1992 four farmers in Zhejiang drained five village ponds and found they were not ponds. Underneath were 24 hand-cut sandstone caverns, each averaging over 1,000 square metres of floor with ceilings up to 30 metres, more...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Mogao Caves and the sealed library Legend
A monk called Le Zun saw a vision of a thousand Buddhas in golden light here in 366 and began cutting. Five hundred temples went into the cliff 25 km southeast of Dunhuang, and carved on for a thousand years while the Silk Road...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Tarim mummies Legend
Bodies preserved by the dryness of the Tarim Basin, the earliest group dated 2135 to 1623 BC and others running down to the last centuries BC, found around Lop Nur, Subeshi, Loulan and along the southern rim near Khotan and...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Yeren of Shennongjia Legend
China’s wild man. The yeren is reported from the forested Shennongjia mountains of Hubei, a tall red-haired hominid seen by, among others, local officials and a 1970s state-backed expedition that found hair and footprints but...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Yungang Grottoes Legend
Roughly 51,000 Buddha figures sit in as many niches here, cut into a sandstone ridge 16 km west of Datong across 53 major caves and around 1,100 smaller ones. The carving ran in three phases, the first finishing about 465, the...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Zhangye Danxia Legend
Hills striped in red, orange, yellow and green as if they had been painted in bands, hundreds of metres tall and smooth as poured wax. It took about 24 million years: sandstone and mineral layers laid down one over another, then...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The unopened tomb of Qin Shi Huang Legend
The terracotta army, eight thousand individually-faced soldiers, is only the outer guard. The burial mound of China’s first emperor sits nearby and has never been opened. Sima Qian, writing a century later, describes a...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Zhangjiajie Legend
Quartz-sandstone pillars standing hundreds of metres out of the forest in Hunan, and the mechanism behind them is not the usual one. This is not karst; nothing is dissolving. The rock is being levered apart physically, by water...
Open it on the map · Read the story
Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
Open the map