Guoliang Tunnel
Interesting facts
- The diggers cut 35 openings into the outer wall to throw out rubble; today these 'windows' light the gallery and serve as viewpoints over the gorge.
- Chinese accounts say the builders wore out about 4,000 hammers and used some 12 tonnes of steel while cutting through the rock.
- Guoliang sits at about 1,700 m on a cliff ledge, enclosed by mountains on three sides and facing a sheer drop on the fourth.
- The old stone stairway that was once the village's only link to the outside world was first cut in the Ming dynasty and widened under the Qing emperor Daoguang.
- Shen Mingxin first proposed carving the road in autumn 1971, and the first blows against the cliff were struck on 9 March 1972.
- Once the thirteen villagers had begun, the county authorities backed the project, and nearly 300 local teachers also joined the construction work.
- The release of the Chinese film comedy Raise Your Hands drew a wave of visitors to Guoliang and its cliff road.
- In 2016 Guangdong Television broadcast a four-part documentary about how the villagers carved their gallery road out of the cliff.
Why it is worth it
For centuries the only way out of Guoliang, a village perched on a cliff in the Taihang Mountains of northern Henan, was a stairway cut into the rock face. In 1972 the villagers, led by their party secretary Shen Mingxin, decided to cut a road through the cliff themselves. They sold livestock to raise money for tools and materials, and a team of thirteen began work with hammers, chisels and hand drills; at the hardest stretches progress was a metre every three days, and at least one villager died during the work. The road opened to traffic on 1 May 1977.
The result is a gallery road cut along and through the cliff: a passage roughly 5 metres high and 4 metres wide, running for about 1.2โ1.3 km through hard sedimentary sandstone. The roughly 26,000 cubic metres of rock removed were taken out by the villagers themselves, almost entirely by hand, which is what makes the road remarkable rather than its length.
The road turned an isolated farming community into a destination. A Japanese film crew documented it as early as 1976, films were shot in the village afterwards, and Guoliang became part of the Wanxian Mountain scenic area, a nationally graded park of cliffs, waterfalls and viewpoints. The village has been named in legend after Guo Liang, a rebel of the Han dynasty said to have held off imperial troops in these mountains; treat that as local tradition.
Getting there
Guoliang lies in Huixian county-level city, in the mountains about 63 km from Xinxiang. The nearest airport in a straight line is Handan (HDG), about 115 km away; most international travellers arrive through Zhengzhou Xinzheng International Airport (CGO), the main gateway to Henan, and continue by road via Xinxiang and Huixian.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Guoliang Tunnel (Chinese: ้ญไบฎๆด) is carved along the side of and through a mountain in China. The tunnel links the village of Guoliang to the outside through the Taihang Mountains which are situated in Huixian, Xinxiang, Henan Province of China.
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