Why it's worth going underground at Yellow Dragon Cave
Picture this: you've spent the whole day craning your neck up at the sandstone pillars of Wulingyuan, and then you duck into a cave mouth and drop down beneath the very mountain you just climbed. The air cools at once, the noise falls away, and in front of you is a chamber with a ceiling lost in the dark, a forest of stalactites and stalagmites running off as far as you can see, and — unlike any cave you've been in before — an underground river running through it that you actually float along by boat, in the dim, hidden under the range.
This is Yellow Dragon Cave (黄龙洞 Huanglong Dong), a giant limestone cave often called one of the biggest show-caves in China, on the eastern side of the Wulingyuan Scenic Area, just a 20-minute drive from Wulingyuan itself and the Grand Canyon. Inside, it spreads over four levels of wide chambers, countless stalactites and stalagmites, underground rivers, lakes and waterfalls, with several kilometres of walkway in total.
Two things get talked about most. The first is the boat ride along the underground river, about 800 metres of the route done on the water. The second is a stalagmite called the "Dinghai Needle" (定海神针), around 19.2 metres tall but so pinched in the middle that it narrows to just about 10 centimetres across — fragile enough that the cave insured it for 100 million yuan. Yellow Dragon Cave ends up being both a feat of natural scale and an indoor sight that doesn't depend on the weather at all.
