Zhijin Cave (织金洞)

Why Go

The Colour, and What Is Under It

1. Deal with the lighting first

Every photograph on this page is lit in colour, and so is the cave. Blue on the walls, orange on a feature formation, yellow along a passage, violet in the distance. This is the standard way Chinese show caves are presented, it is not going to change because a foreign visitor dislikes it, and pretending otherwise would misdescribe the visit. One of the pictures below shows a slope where the blue gel stops and the yellow one begins, with a hard line between them.

It is worth understanding what it is for. A cave lit in white light is grey, brown and cream, and reads as undifferentiated rock to somebody walking through it in twenty minutes. The colour separates planes, marks out the features the guides talk about, and turns a geological site into a spectacle, which is what most of the visitors have paid for. The cost is that the actual colour of the rock is hidden, and the actual colour is worth seeing.

There is one picture below taken under plain warm light with no gels, and it is the most useful image on the page. The formations are cream, ochre and grey-brown, the fresh tips are almost white, and the surfaces are matt rather than glowing. That is what you are looking at under the blue.

2. Read the forms, and you have something to do for two hours

The vocabulary is small and it makes the whole cave legible. Water carrying dissolved limestone drips from a ceiling and leaves a ring, which grows down into a stalactite. What lands on the floor builds up into a stalagmite. If the two meet they become a column. Where the water runs down a sloping surface instead of dripping, it leaves a hanging sheet, which is drapery. Where it spreads out across a floor it leaves flowstone, which is the rippled rock that looks like a frozen river.

Once those five are in your head the chambers stop being an undifferentiated cave. The pictures below have all of them: a ceiling hung with a dense field of stalactites and drapery; a floor of rippled flowstone with a shouldered boss standing on it; slender stalagmites with a knobbly stacked surface like a pile of discs; and a chamber of very large columns, banded and fluted, that have been building since long before anyone came down here.

The scale is the part that photographs badly. Only one of the fifteen source pictures has a person in it, and it is the one below with a man standing at the foot of an orange-lit formation whose egg-shaped base is several times his height, with a spire above that going much higher again, all of it mirrored in still water. Look at that one first. Everything else in the set is larger than it appears.

Orientation

One Route, One Direction

The cave is entered at one end and left at the other, on a paved and stepped route with handrails and fixed lighting, in a group with a guide. The chambers open one after another and the route does not double back, so there is no choosing what to see or how long to spend on it.

What that means practically is that the visit is over in two or three hours and cannot be extended. Anyone who wants to look properly should walk near the back of the group, where there is a little more room and the guide’s amplifier is further away.

Context

A Province Built on Soluble Rock

Guizhou is a limestone province, lifted high and cut into by rivers, and almost every kind of karst landform is represented somewhere in it. Water sinks into the rock rather than running across it, which is why the surface is short of water even where rainfall is high, and why there is so much of this sort of thing underneath.

Caves are the middle stage of that process. Water dissolves passages along joints and bedding planes; if the water table drops, the passages drain and the air gets in; and then the slow business of redeposition begins, which is what builds everything in these photographs. The end of the sequence is on this site too: at Wulong, a few hundred kilometres east, the roofs of chambers like these have come down and left open pits with the surviving stretches standing as natural bridges. Zhijin is a cave with its roof still on.

The economics are worth a sentence as well. Caves are the most reliable tourism asset a poor upland county can have: they work in any weather, they take a fixed number of people an hour, and once the path and the lighting are installed the running costs are low. That is why there are so many show caves in this part of China, why they are lit the way they are, and why the one you are in is often the main employer for the village outside it.

Where to Base

Guiyang (贵阳)

Guiyang is the provincial capital and the usual base, with an airport and high-speed rail, and the cave is a couple of hours away by road. Bijie, the prefecture town, is nearer but has less to offer an evening.

Anyone spending several days in Guizhou should treat this as one item in a karst circuit rather than a destination on its own. The province rewards a week, and almost every stop on it is the same rock doing something different.