Reed Flute Cave, the Nature's Art Palace

photo courtesy Roy Chung

One of the China's most amazing wonders of nature is the Reed Flute Cave. Scientists give the cave's age as 180 million years old. During all these years Mother Nature has been creating something incredible inside this cave: a spectacular world of various stalactites and stalagmites, weirdly-shaped stone pillars and wonderful rock formations. According to the legend, a local peasant who were looking for a good quality reed to make a flute, accidentally discovered the entrance to the cave. And since then, for over 1200 years, the site has been one of Guilin's most interesting attractions. And that's how the cave got its poetic name. Perhaps the first inscription out of more than 70 found in the cave and dating back as far as 792 AD was made exactly by that lucky peasant.

When I was a child I watched a movie where the main character instead of drowning finds himself in the Underwater Kingdom and visits the Palace of the Underwater King. And that is what the Reed Flute Cave reminds me of - that fairy-tale Palace of the Underwater King. The incredible multicoloured illumination of the cave's unimaginable natural formations creates indeed fantastic effects along this 240-meter-long cave. Amazingly beautiful though it distracts in a way from the cave's natural beauty.

Definitely a must see in China!

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