Longyou County

Longyou County (龙游县 Lóngyóu Xiàn) is in Quzhou Prefecture, Zhejiang Province. It has a total area of ​​1138.7 square kilometres and a total population of 410000.

Understand

You're probably coming here to see the Longyou Grottoes, which can be visited in a few hours. These are not well known outside Zhejiang and do not get many foreign visitors.

Get in

By train

• 1 Longyou station (龙游火车站). This station in the south of town serves both high-speed and regular trains on the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Changsha-Kunming lines between Hangzhou and Shangrao. (updated May 2018)

By bus

• 2 North bus station (龙游客运北站). The main bus station is on the north side of the river not far from the Grottoes, and has regular buses to other major cities in Zhejiang. (updated May 2018)

Get around

There are several local bus routes, notably route 9, which connects the train station with the Grottoes via a bus yard and the middle of town. Officially this runs more than 20 times per day, but the reality may be different.

Taxis can be found, and will generally find you. Do not assume that you will be the only passenger(s). There are also smaller, slower pedicabs.

See

• 1 Longyou Grottoes (龙游石窟, Lóngyóu Shíkū) (By bus 9 / K8). 08:00-16:30. The Longyou Grottoes are a series of at least 24 large artificial sandstone caverns located inside Phoenix Hill, just north of the centre of Longyou on the north bank of the Qu River. They are thought to date to a period before the creation of the Qin Dynasty in 212 BCE, but there is no record of their existence prior to 1992. They were discovered when a local spent 17 days pumping out one of the local rectangular fishing holes. The small fishing holes held much larger fish than might be expected given their area at the surface. The almost completely unadorned grottoes average more than 1000 square metres in area, reach depths of 30m, have thin walls between them but do not connect, and would have required the excavation of nearly one million cubic metres of sandstone. It is not known when they were built, by whom, for what purpose, nor where the excavated stone went. Five of the grottoes have been drained, lit, and connected on a tour route. In the first of these mysterious ancient excavations, some of the walls and support columns have now been decoratively carved. ¥85 entrance fee. (updated Jan 2018)

Go next

If you want to see more rock, some sandstone hills and an arch can be seen outside Quzhou, and Sanqingshan is gorgeous.