Caving Expedition Reports

YRC Caving Expeditions to Tian’e and Fenshan, Guangxi Province, China 2001-2015

Abstract: Carbonate rocks in China have an outcrop area of about 910,000km2, and including areas covered by insoluble rocks they extend beneath more than 3.4 million km2 (about one third of the country’s land area). Given these statistics it is not surprising that both the number and the size of caves in China are staggering. Most are within the almost continuous karst outcrop of 0.5 million km2 underlying Guizhou and Guangxi and their neighbouring provinces. According to current statistics there are 657 and 564 caves respectively in the provinces of Guizhou and Guangxi alone, and of these 13 have more than 10km of surveyed passages and 7 are more than 400m deep. Most large caves with more than 5km of mapped passage have been explored by international teams since 1985, a significant proportion of these by cavers of the China Caves Project, who by 2014 had mounted 27 expeditions many involving YRC members.