The Remains and Working Methods of the Qiuhu Mountain Quarry

The Qiuhu Mountain Quarry lies at what is now Qiuhu Mountain, Yongyang Subdistrict, Lishui District. The Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism's list of municipal protected sites records it as Ming, at Qiuhu Mountain, Yongyang Subdistrict. The batch is confirmed by the municipal notice: Ning Zheng Fa [2006] No. 131 of 10 June 2006 published 159 third-batch municipal protected sites, and the Qiuhu Mountain Quarry is one of the two Lishui entries under the category of caves, temples and stone carvings, its period given as "Ming" and its address as "Qiuhu Mountain, Yongyang Town, Lishui County". The entry is arranged as a quarry within that category, and the classification is reproduced here rather than reassigned to ancient sites.

The hill and its situation

According to the Master Plan for the Wuxiang Mountain National Forest Park, Nanjing (2023–2035), issued by the Jiangsu Provincial Forestry Bureau, the summit of Qiuhu Mountain is 279.8 m above sea level and lies 13 km southeast of the Lishui urban area; it forms part of the Wuxiang Mountain National Forest Park, and the hills within the park belong to the Maoshan range. In the watershed running through the Recent Implementation Plan for the Territorial Spatial Planning of Lishui District, the line of the summits of Qiuhu Mountain, Shuangjian Mountain, Ma'an Mountain and Ping'an Mountain forms the turning point of the divide: the watershed opens in a V, sending northern water by the Yigan River and the Lishui River into the Qinhuai River and southern water by the Xinqiao River or the Tianshengqiao River into Shijiu Lake. The public notice on the first batch of Lishui place-name cultural heritage lists Qiuhu Mountain among the "geographical and natural entities crossing townships and subdistricts", spanning Yongyang Subdistrict and Jingqiao Town — the hill on which the quarry stands is therefore not confined to Yongyang Subdistrict.

One point about the name must be explained. The hill was formerly called Qinghong Mountain (also written Qinghong), and is now called Qiuhu Mountain, the change being a mispronunciation in the local dialect. The Guangxu gazetteer, juan 20, records three temples on the hill under the old name: Qinghong Temple "built in the Tang", Longlin Temple "founded in the fifteenth year of the Chongzhen era (1642) by the local Wei Yifan", and Zhongshan Temple "built in the first year of the Tianqi era (1621)", all three given as "twenty-five li to the southeast". This entry uses the current name, quoting the old name where the gazetteer is cited. The same master plan elsewhere writes the name as Qiuhu Mountain with a different first character; both denote the same hill.

Form of the remains

The quarry left a group of artificial traces at the summit, what the Qing literature calls the "cavern wall". According to travel and media accounts (secondary description, with no survey or excavation report behind it): the cliff face is 3 to 10 m high and the marks of pick and chisel are clearly legible; there is a pool inside the cavern that never dries; a stone bridge formed by the quarrying spans the mouth of the cavern; and at the innermost part of the wall are a stone bed and steps cut into the rock. The statement that the stone tanks are "tens of zhang deep" recurs across several of these retellings and appears to be copied from one source; it is not independent measured data.

The gazetteer record of quarrying on the hill, as quoted by the Wuxiang Mountain scenic area website among others from the Guangxu gazetteer:

（青洪山）上有石龙潭，土人尝采石于此。

Translated: (On Qinghong Mountain) there is a Stone Dragon Pool, where the local people have formerly quarried stone.

This must be marked as a quotation at second hand: the Shidian transcription and the scenic area page both read "石龙潭" (Stone Dragon Pool), while two other retellings read "石龙溧" and "石龙湫"; the three differ in the written form and the wording has not yet been settled against a facsimile of the original. The phrase "the local people have formerly quarried stone here" is the most direct single statement of quarrying on this hill in the old gazetteers.

The naming of the scenic site and its entry in the gazetteer

The stone tanks, cavern walls and stone bridge left by the quarrying were named "Music from the Cavern Wall" by the Qing, because "clear water flows in the crevices of the rock, and where it strikes it makes a sound, long and tuneful like a qin". The Qing writer Wang Mingbiao has a seven-line regulated verse on it (attributed to him in a CNTV script; no facsimile or bibliographic record of a Wang Mingbiao poetry collection was located in this round, so it is cited only at media level):

高山自昔引知音，洞里伊谁鼓玉琴。断续声从云表落，悠扬韵向壁间侵。响催野鹤来翔舞，气洽清霜共写心。莫倩坡翁成小记，石钟疑案到于今！

Translated: The lofty mountain has long drawn those who understand its music; who within the cavern plays the jade qin? The sound breaks and falls from the clouds, its melody reaching along the walls. It urges the wild cranes to come and dance, and moves those whose hearts are clear as autumn frost to write of it. Let Su Shi not be asked to make his little essay on the stone chimes, for that question is still open to this day.

"Music from the Cavern Wall" is one of the Eight Views of Zhongshan formed for Qing Lishui. Yang Su and Ling Qianying, in "A Study of Landscape Images of Lishui Gardens in Qing-Dynasty Jiangsu Local Gazetteers" (Journal of Nanjing Forestry University (Social Sciences), vol. 22, no. 3, 2019), record that the Qianlong gazetteer printed images of the Eight Views, two plates per view making sixteen pages in all, the eight being the Spirit Lamps of Chenling, the Stone Swallows of Zhishan, the Green Peaks of Guanfeng, the Mist and Rain of Longtan, the Golden Well Spring, the Music from the Cavern Wall, the Rising Peaks of Donglu and the Fishing Song over the Lake. The same paper describes the image of this view as showing "Qinghong Temple half hidden among the bamboo, with the sight of clear water flowing in the crevices of the rock". The Qing painter Gan Qinglian wrote a poem on the site; the scenic area website states that he painted the Eight Views for the Lishui gazetteer in the forty-first year of Qianlong (a claim with only that one source so far).

A Lishui114 forum post transcribes Dong Yuqing's Republican-era Lishui Local Studies Reader with modern annotations, and states that neither the Ming Wanli, the Qing Shunzhi nor the Qing Kangxi gazetteer records the "Eight Views of Zhongshan", only the Qianlong gazetteer printing the images and poems, so that the Eight Views were formed no later than the Qianlong period. This agrees with the academic paper cited above. Two of the eight names differ in the transcriptions: the paper reads "东庐叠献" and "归湖渔歌", while the scenic area page and the forum post read "东庐叠巘" and "臼湖渔歌"; both stand, undecided.

Whether the four characters for "Music from the Cavern Wall" are indeed carved on the rock wall is likewise disputed: the Lishui114 post says "to this day the four characters still exist on the stone, it is said to be the hand of a Tang man", while travel and media accounts say "the four characters '洞壁琴音' carved by Qing people are still on the cavern wall". The Tang and Qing attributions conflict and are set side by side without choosing.

Working years and the destination of the stone

The period "Ming" in the heritage register is a characterisation of the remains at the time of listing. This entry does not infer specific working years from "Ming", for three reasons.

First, the statement found in travel and media accounts that "in the Jiajing reign of the Ming, when Lishui built its stone city, stone was quarried here" is labelled by every account as folk legend (the original reads "民间传说"), and is not treated here as established. Second, the account that "in the Shunzhi era of the Qing the Lishui man Wei Bing held that Qiuhu Mountain was the source of the county's vital vein and should not be quarried, and the mine was therefore abandoned" is stated flatly in every account, but no document or heritage-authority material supporting it has been found; it is an unverified local account, and if it were sound, the quarrying would have ceased before the late Ming. Third, as to the use and destination of the stone quarried, no source mentions anything beyond the legend that it went into the county city wall; the relation between the Lishui city wall and the Jiajing reign is covered by other sources in this library, and must not be treated as established here.

One further note on modern administrative history: according to the Lishui114 post, the hill lay within the former Donglu and Xinqiao townships; the quarrying remains known as "Music from the Cavern Wall" gave the hill a name in modern times, and after Liberation the Donglu township gave rise to the production teams "Dongbi" and "Qinyin", later assigned to Donglu and Qiuhu administrative villages respectively (基层建制沿革，未经档案核实 — a record of local unit history, unverified against archives).

Basis for the date

time is set to 1400–1600, at a precision of century and marked as approximate. The range is simply the span of calendar years corresponding to the recorded period Ming, used to place the site roughly on a timeline; it is not the span of the quarry's working life. The sources give no specific years, and this entry supplies none.

Open questions

• There is a conflict over the level of protection: Ning Zheng Fa [2006] No. 131 makes this a municipal-level protected site (gov-open), while the Youlü holiday site and a Sina blog both say it "has long been listed as a county-level protected site". Both accounts stand, and this entry's confidence is not raised on that basis.
• The number and distribution of the workings and the dimensions of each cavern rest on a single secondary source, and the "tens of zhang deep" figure appears to be copied from one source; there is no measured data.
• Whether the stone bed and steps are quarry faces, working platforms or later masonry cannot be determined from the sources available, and are not named here.
• The three written forms "石龙潭", "石龙溧" and "石龙湫" differ and must be settled against a facsimile of the Guangxu gazetteer.
• The date of the four carved characters on the wall is disputed between a Tang and a Qing attribution.
• Apart from legend, there is no evidence for the destination of the stone; the relation between the quarrying and stone-built works of Ming-era Lishui can only be discussed with documentary or field evidence.
• As to the effect of the park and boardwalk on the remains: a 2020 travel blog records that a timber boardwalk now leads to the summit (a self-media observation, unverified); whether the remains have been altered as a result is untraced.