Qiuhu Mountain Quarry

The Qiuhu Mountain Quarry is a Ming quarry site at what is now Qiuhu Mountain, Yongyang Subdistrict, Lishui District. The Nanjing municipal list of protected sites records it as Ming, at Qiuhu Mountain, Yongyang Subdistrict.

The batch is now confirmed against the municipal gazette notice. Ning Zheng Fa [2006] No. 131 of 10 June 2006 published the third batch of 159 municipal protected sites. The Qiuhu Mountain Quarry appears as item 10 in the "caves and stone inscriptions" section, with the period given as Ming and the address recorded as "Qiuhu Mountain, Yongyang Town, Lishui County". The notice files a quarry under that section rather than under the ancient-sites section; this entry keeps the classification as printed.

Location and mountain

According to the Overall Plan for the Nanjing Wuxiangshan National Forest Park (2023—2035) of the Jiangsu Provincial Forestry Bureau, Qiuhu Mountain has a summit elevation of 279.8 metres and lies 13 kilometres southeast of the Lishui urban area, forming part of the Wuxiangshan National Forest Park. The public notice of the first batch of district place-name cultural heritage lists names Qiuhu Mountain among the "geographical and natural entities spanning two subdistricts", crossing Yongyang Subdistrict and Jingqiao Town: the mountain carrying the quarry is therefore not confined to Yongyang Subdistrict. No second elevation figure has been verified for this site.

The mountain was formerly called Qinghong Mountain (also written Qinghongshan), and is now called Qiuhu Mountain; the change is a corruption of the local pronunciation. Volume 20 of the Guangxu Lishui Gazetteer records the mountain's hermitages under the old name Qinghong Mountain (Qinghong Hermitage "built in the Tang", Longlin Hermitage north of Qinghong Mountain "proposed in the fifteenth year of the Chongzhen era (1642) by the county man Wei Yifan, on the site of a wild pond", Zhongshan Hermitage "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 in its text and quotes the old name when citing the gazetteer.

Remains and landscape

Quarrying left a group of artificial traces at the summit, what Qing documents call the "cavern wall". According to travel and media accounts (secondary accounts, with no survey or excavation report behind them): the cliff is 3 to 10 metres high with clearly recognisable tool marks; there is a pool inside the cavern that never dries; and a stone bridge formed by the quarrying spans the mouth of the cavern. The repeated claim that the stone pits are "tens of zhang deep" appears in several reprinted accounts that appear to copy one another, and is not an independent measured figure.

The gazetteer's record of quarrying on this mountain, as quoted by the media from the Guangxu Lishui Gazetteer, reads:

（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 ancient-text transcription and the Wuxiangshan scenic-area page both give "Stone Dragon Pool", while two other quoted accounts give "Shilong Li" and "Shilong Qiu"; the three differ in wording, and this library has not yet checked them against a facsimile of the original.

The stone pits, cavern wall and bridge left by the quarrying were named "Music from the Cavern Wall" by the Qing, because the spring flowing through the crevices of the rock made a sound as it struck; this is one of the eight Zhongshan scenes of Lishui in the Qing. The form of the remains, the naming and recording of the landscape, and the disagreements over the working dates are treated in the related entry "The Remains and Working Methods of the Qiuhu Mountain Quarry".

Dates of working

The municipal list gives only the level, period and location. It gives neither the extent of the quarry nor its working methods nor specific years of working, and the notice likewise settles the level and the batch but not the working methods. This entry does not infer a span of years from the recorded period of Ming. In the media accounts, "in the Jiajing era of the Ming the city wall of Lishui was built, and the stone for it was quarried here" is labelled an oral tradition by every outlet, and the claim that quarrying was stopped in the Shunzhi era because a man named Wei Bing held that Qiuhu Mountain was the seat of the county's vein and should not be cut is stated as fact but is unsupported; neither is treated here as established.

A note on local administration in the modern period: according to a Lishui114 forum post (an individual researcher's post), the remains known as "Music from the Cavern Wall" made the mountain known in modern times, and after the liberation the Donglu commune gave rise to the "Dongbi production brigade" and the "Qinyin production brigade", later belonging to the Donglu and Qiuhu administrative villages respectively (a matter of grassroots administrative lineage, unverified against archives).

Open questions

• The protection level is contested: Ning Zheng Fa [2006] No. 131 lists it in the third batch of municipal-level protected sites (gov-open), whereas Youlü Holiday and a Sina blog both state that the site "has long been listed as a county-level protected site". Both accounts stand; the entry's confidence is not raised on this account.
• The number and distribution of the stone pits 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 survey data.
• Whether the four characters "洞壁琴音" are indeed inscribed on the rock is contested between a Tang and a Qing attribution; and "石龙潭／石龙溧／石龙湫" appear in three different forms.
• The destination of the quarried stone is unattested beyond oral tradition; the relation between the quarry and Ming-era stone works in the district cannot be discussed without documentary or field evidence.