Fengdu Snow Jade Cave

Fengdu Snow Jade Cave

Fengdu Snow Jade Cave is a national AAAA-level tourist attraction.

Snow Jade Cave is only 17 kilometers from the new immigrant city of Fengdu and faces the Ming Mountain scenic area of Fengdu Ghost City across the river. The scenic spot enjoys convenient transportation—you can take a boat from Chongqing to Fengdu and then transfer to a vehicle to reach the cave, or you can drive directly from Chongqing. Snow Jade Cave stretches over 1,600 meters in total, with 1,166 meters currently open to visitors. It is divided into three levels and six main sightseeing areas: Gathering of Elites, Heaven on Earth, Step by Step Ascend, Scenery of the North, Palace in Jade, and A Promising Future. Among its wonders are four world-class spectacles: first, the 4-meter-high, ice-pure "Snow Jade Penguin" shield; second, the largest and most numerous cluster of tower corals; third, the crystal-clear, 8-meter-long King of Stone Flags; and fourth, the densest cluster of stalactites in the world, which brave the frost—its density is the highest on record. There are also over 100 other fascinating sights to see. "A glacial highland inside a cave, a cool summer retreat"—the temperature inside Snow Jade Cave remains a constant 18°C all year round, making it an ideal place to escape the heat. "Snowflakes from hundreds of millions of years ago, jade from trillions of years in the future"—as you stroll through Snow Jade Cave, you will marvel at a vast array of naturally-formed stalactites, enchanting stalagmites, feeding-ready stone stalagmites, exquisitely beautiful stone pillars, paper-thin stone flags, wind-swaying stone strips, majestic stone curtains, hanging stone draperies, cascading stone waterfalls, starry stone flowstone dams, unbelievable stone hairs, and curling stones in countless forms, as well as a variety of amusing bird, beast, and fish shapes formed by the dissolution of cave walls.

Snow Jade Cave is a gem among the karst cave clusters of the Long River tourist area and is the youngest developed cave in China that is still growing. Its discovery has drawn widespread attention and high praise from many renowned experts and scholars in the field of speleology. Professor Yuan Daoxian, a leading Chinese cave expert and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has visited Snow Jade Cave multiple times for academic research. Professor Elcay Hamilton Smith (Smith), an international authority on karst natural heritage and chairman of the Cave Specialist Group under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Heritage Centre, led a team to inspect Snow Jade Cave and praised it as "a truly beautiful cave in the world, one of the rarest I have encountered in my career." Due to its exceptional aesthetic and scientific research value, Snow Jade Cave has been designated by the Chinese Association of Speleology as the "Observation and Research Station of the Cave Research Society of the Geological Society of China and a Popular Science Base for Caves," and has been named by the Karst Dynamics Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences as a "National Key Research Cave Experimental Base." In 2005, it was rated as a AAAA-level tourist attraction by the National Tourism Administration and was listed among the "Six Most Beautiful Tourist Caves in China" by Chinese National Geography magazine, ranking high on the list of "The Most Beautiful Places in China."