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China boasts an extensive distribution of soluble rocks, with carbonate rocks exposed on the surface covering 910,000 square kilometers. Including those covered or buried underground, the total area of soluble rock distribution reaches 3.4 million square kilometers. The southern provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei, and Guangdong are the most important karst regions, where the total thickness of carbonate rock deposits exceeds ten thousand meters, distributed across almost all geological eras. The vast expanse of carbonate rocks, combined with diverse and favorable climatic conditions, makes China the country with the richest karst cave resources in the world.
China is home to hundreds of thousands of karst caves spread across its vast territory — from Yichun in Heilongjiang in the north to Sanya on Hainan Island in the south, and from Shiquan River in Tibet in the west to Tonghua and Hangzhou in the east. Moreover, the scientific documentation and discussion of these caves have a long history. As early as the “Classic of Mountains” (from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods) and the first pharmacopoeia, the “Shennong’s Classic of Materia Medica” (from the Western Han Dynasty), there are records of karst caves and their chemical sediments. Many caves were visited and explored by travelers before the Sui and Tang dynasties, leaving behind a wealth of stone inscriptions and other cultural relics. Xu Xiake (1587–1641), the great geographer and traveler of the Ming Dynasty, personally explored over 300 karst caves in the south, becoming a pioneer in global cave exploration and research. In modern times, China’s karst cave archaeology and cave culture studies, represented by the Peking Man Cave at Zhoukoudian in Beijing, have attracted worldwide attention. With the development of national economic construction and the growth of joint Sino-foreign cave exploration activities, a number of massive and challenging cave systems have been surveyed, yielding new findings.
An increasing number of karst caves are being discovered, explored, and developed. According to preliminary statistics, there are over 400 karst caves with surveyed passage lengths exceeding 500 meters. As of May 2002, China had 108 caves measured to be longer than 3,000 meters; approximately 300 caves have been developed for tourism; and nearly 100 caves hold significant archaeological value. The largest known cave system is the Bailong Underground River Cave System in Leye, Guangxi, with surveyed passages totaling 75 kilometers in length. It is followed by the Tenglong Cave in Lichuan County, Hubei Province, where the water cave and dry cave together stretch 52.8 kilometers. Other cave systems with passages exceeding 20 kilometers include the Bailong Cave System in Xiuwen, Guizhou, the Longzi River Giant Cave in Zhenyuan, the Shuanghe Cave and Duobin Cave in Suiyang.
Many caves feature enormous chambers. Worldwide, there are 24 known individual cave chambers with floor areas greater than 30,000 square meters, seven of which are in China. The Miao Chamber in the Gebi River Cave System in Guizhou has an area of 116,000 square meters, ranking as the second largest in the world. In terms of single chamber volume, the Red Rose Hall in the Da’cao Cave of Leye County, Guangxi, has a volume of 7 million cubic meters, ranking second globally.
Long and large caves are most developed in the humid tropical and subtropical climate zones of southern China, particularly concentrated in Guizhou, Guangxi, Yunnan, Sichuan, western Hunan, western Hubei, and northern Guangdong. In China’s southeastern coastal areas — such as Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hainan, and Taiwan — carbonate rocks are distributed sporadically in island-like or strip formations. The climatic conditions are favorable, and caves are relatively well-developed, though their scale and density are far less than those in the southwestern regions. The northern regions, once thought to have underdeveloped karst caves, have also seen continuous discoveries in recent years. Most are groundwater-level type caves, with many exceeding 1,000 meters in length, such as the Benxi Water Cave in Liaoning (3,134 meters long) and the Shihua Cave in Fangshan District, Beijing (2,500 meters long).
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