BIG BLUE - Share the Life

During our recent winter trip to the thousand island lake, with plenty of rain, and cold weather, but that didn't stop the PADI and NAUI divers Paul and Leigh, driving down to Qiandao Lake to explore the ancient city. In April of 2008, we found the underwater city – Shi Cheng which has a 1800 year history. Beautifully uncovered during "Ching Ming" the holiday of the spirits where family's worship their ancestors by visiting the graves. We saw many buildings and traditional Chinese symbols underwater, we had high hopes in exploring the city extensively before the upcoming summer diving season.

6c Air temperature and 10c water temperature with rain that lasted the entire trip, We put on our dry suits and all equipment before the cold plunge into the water. During the first dive we done an overview of the old site to check for any damage from a nearby reclamation site over the winter.

After a quick swim around we went straight for the tunnel which we found last year on our adventures to see what was at the other side. after a long swim through we popped out the other side and a quick overview of the area before surfacing.

The Tunnel was the the Gate to the City, great, a second dive here we come! With a new tank and a long surface interval we searched around the entrance area to be greeted by windows and corridors of buildings and walls, with a very old gaping gate standing 3meters tall.

After our surface interval we set a heading to stick to, after a few seconds of swimming along with our buddy line that we setup we noticed a large black object in the distance.. what did we find?!

Closer and closer we got, the more apparent it was, the Pai Fang from earlier in the year! fantastic, we found the missing Pai Fang! Up went the SMB to mark the location as we swam up slowly to our safety stop.

The next dive we were armed with cameras as we descended on the archway. a few minutes later we were engulping the archway and recording as much detail as we could. It stood tall with the characters of "Sheng Zhi" along with a dragon wrapping around it - from our research it appears the Pai Fang was the mark of an emperor. It followed with 2 other characters which read "Xiao Jie", this was built as a tribute to a woman that treated her parents and husband with honour and respect, further down we found the name of the wife for who it was a tribute for, no further information was apparent and no signature or date was found.

The next dive was spent exploring the area, again on a chosen direction, we came across an in ground well, and then what appeared to be a river with a very long tunnel about 30-40meters, plenty of buildings with broken walls and collapsed roof tops, these buildings were old but still standing tall.

We believe there are many surprises waiting for us, this 1800 year old city is waiting for us to explore, with 2km of area to search. so when are you coming on the next adventure to discover the sunken Atlantis of the east?

[ 2009-03-02 ]