An Ice Cave in the Luya Mountains

The cave is cold the way a deep cellar is cold, and the ice in it lasts through the summer. It lies in the Luya Mountain scenic area, at Dongzhai town in Ningwu County, and the mountain around it is a spur of the Lüliang range that stands 2,739 metres at its main peak, thirty kilometres south-west of the county seat. Two rivers begin on these slopes: the Fen, which runs the length of Shanxi, and the Sanggan, which leaves the range to the north-east. The scenic area is organised around the Taizi Hall peak and covers about 321 square kilometres, and the ice cave is one site among several, with the Malun grassland and the hanging coffins at Shimen.

A cave is not the obvious thing to find in this country. Xinzhou has a continental, semi-arid climate, with long, very dry and cold winters and warm, somewhat humid summers, and the Luya slopes are open mountain country of grassland and cliff. The other sites of the scenic area are of that kind: the Malun grassland on the high ground, the hanging coffins set into the rock at Shimen, the peaks around the Taizi Hall. The ice cave is the exception, the one place where a visit goes underground and the season inside does not follow the season outside. It sits high in the range, at the end of a mountain road, and it asks for patience with that road rather than with a monument.

Ice that lasts through the summer needs two conditions, and a cave can supply both. The first is a store of winter cold: a chamber with a narrow mouth takes in dense cold air in winter, the cold drains to the bottom and stays there. The second is shelter from summer heat and from the sun. Where both hold, ice that formed long ago can persist, and the cave at Ningwu is described as a large example of the kind found outside the permafrost belt, where ground ice is not expected. Its formation is placed in the glacial period of the Quaternary, the Cenozoic ice ages, about three million years ago. The interest of the place is that the ice is out of place.