Description:
The Ancient Yangshan Quarry in China.
Few have heard of it and even fewer have seen it.
It is absolutely amazing.
As you can see from the pictures, the miners of this quarry, whoever they were, were extracting three different blocks of rock from the rock.
The Base Stele is 30.35 metres long, 13 metres thick and 16 metres high and weighs 16,250 tonnes.
The body has dimensions of 49.4 metres long, 10.7 metres wide and 4.4 metres thick and weighs 8,799 tonnes.
The head of the stele measures 10.7 metres high, 20.3 metres wide, 8.4 metres thick and weighs 6.118 tonnes.
Together the three Yangshan Megaliths weigh over 30,000 tonnes. The famous sunken ocean liner, the Titanic, weighed about 46,000 tonnes.
You can therefore make a comparison. And we must not forget that everything was made in the mountains. That is to say, the people who built them thought they could carry 30,000 tonnes of monolithic rock down to the valley and not break it!
Furthermore, millions of tonnes of material were apparently removed to quarry the monoliths from the rock.
Who cut these gigantic blocks of rock? It was the Chinese emperor Yongle who boasted of this work in 1405.
He said he ordered the cutting of a giant stele in this quarry, to be used in his late father's Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum.
However evidence suggest the monolith was there for 1000s of years earlier. The rock-cutting technique that was used is unmatched before or after in China.
Moreover, the size of the cut stelae was completely beyond the carrying capacity of not only the Chinese of the time, but also of today's Chinese at this scale.
You will be hearing more about this site over the next few years… -Brian Roemmele
