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Fascinating Limestone Karsts
The Stone Forest is a creation of prehistory. In the Permian
period - roughly 270 million years ago - the earth flexed
its muscles, caused an ocean to drain and the limestone seabed
to rise up. The wash of the receding waters, wind and acidic
rains, all lent to the erosion of the limestone until only
tall narrow karsts remained dotting the otherwise barren landscape.
Of course, Chinese legends have far more fanciful
tales than this. One says that a young boy, seeking to create
a dam to help his starving village, stole a magic whip with
the power to move mountains from the tomb of the gods. Unfortunately,
the whip's powers failed with the rising sun and the mountains
ceased their journey to the dam site - inadvertently creating
the Stone Forest. The young man was to have much worse luck
for, finding their magic whip missing, the gods howled out
of their tomb and found the boy still trying to move the mountains.
They extracted a merciless punishment and the cracks in the
karsts are said to be the whip marks from the boy's flogging.
As with the karsts at Halong Bay, in Vietnam, the locals
have given names to many of the rocks pillars - names that
say a lot about how they see the rocks. Mother and Son Going
for a Walk, Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon, and Phoenix Preening
its Wings are some of the more unusual titles given to the
many karsts.
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