Shi Cheng, China: The Lion City Beneath Qiandao Lake

Summary

Shicheng — the "Lion City," named for the Wu Shi (Five Lion) Mountain at whose foot it stood — was an ancient walled city in Chun'an County, Zhejiang Province, whose history as a county seat reaches back to the Tang Dynasty around AD 621. For more than a thousand years it served as the political, economic and cultural heart of the surrounding county, its streets lined with temples, memorial archways and merchant houses behind defensive stone walls, and it reached its architectural high point under the Ming and Qing dynasties.

In 1959 the city was deliberately and permanently submerged to impound the reservoir behind the Xin'an River (Xin'anjiang) hydroelectric dam, the first large hydropower station independently designed and built by the People's Republic of China and the first dam in the country to exceed 100 metres in height. The rising water formed Qiandao Lake — the "Thousand Island Lake" — and the inundation of the wider basin uprooted roughly 290,000 people, drowning two ancient county towns, more than two dozen smaller towns and over 1,300 villages along with tens of thousands of acres of farmland.

Unlike most drowned settlements, Shicheng was not demolished before the waters came; it was left largely intact and sank whole. Resting today between about 26 and 40 metres beneath the surface, sealed away from sunlight, wind, rain and most oxygen, the city has survived in extraordinary condition — wooden beams, carved stone lions, dragons and phoenixes, and hundreds of archways standing as they did before 1959.

Rediscovered by divers in 2001 and brought to global attention around 2011, when the site was placed under provincial heritage protection, Shicheng is now celebrated as a "Chinese Atlantis" and a rare time capsule of imperial-era architecture. Sheltered from sun, wind and rain, its carved lions, archways and timber survive in a condition no above-ground monument of comparable age could match. It draws technical divers and has prompted repeated proposals to survey, protect or commercially present the sunken city to visitors, even as it remains physically out of reach of most who would see it.

Before the Flood

Shicheng grew up around the seat of Sui-an (Sui'an) County, established in the Tang era, and sat at the foot of Wu Shi Mountain, from which it took its popular name, the Lion City. For over a millennium it was the administrative and commercial center of a populous county, and by the early twentieth century it was a substantial walled town of paved streets, courtyard houses, shops and clan halls. It reached its architectural peak under the Ming and Qing dynasties, when generations of officials, merchants and clans endowed it with monumental construction.

The city's defining feature was its architecture in stone and timber. Behind a fortified wall pierced by five city gates ran lanes flanked by ornate memorial archways (paifang) — by some accounts numbering in the hundreds — carved with lions, dragons, phoenixes and historical figures, alongside temples, ancestral shrines and guild buildings. The settlement is thought to have sprawled across an area equivalent to dozens of city blocks, a dense urban fabric rather than a loose cluster of houses. Nearby in the same valley stood a second, even older county town, He Cheng, dating to the Han period, which would share Shicheng's fate.

This was not a remote hamlet but a regional center with deep historical layering, ringed by farmland, hamlets and the ancestral graves of families who had worked the valley for centuries. Its very richness — centuries of monumental carving and continuous habitation — is what makes the underwater site so valuable today, and what made its loss in 1959 a significant erasure of living heritage in eastern China. When the dam came, that accumulated past was not catalogued or carried away but simply left in place to be sealed beneath the rising water.

The Flooding

In the late 1950s the new Chinese state set out to harness the Xin'an River for electricity, building a major dam at Xin'anjiang between roughly 1957 and 1960 to supply power to the growing region around Hangzhou. It was the first large hydroelectric project independently designed and constructed by the People's Republic, and the first dam in China to exceed 100 metres in height, standing about 105 metres tall behind a reservoir of vast capacity. The scheme was a flagship of national industrial modernization, and its priority was effectively absolute.

Filling the reservoir meant inundating an enormous basin. Roughly 290,000 people were resettled, and entire settlements — including the ancient county seats of Shicheng and He Cheng, more than two dozen towns, over 1,300 villages and tens of thousands of acres of farmland — vanished beneath the new lake. The relocation was carried out under the mass-mobilization conditions of the period, when large-scale population movement was an accepted instrument of state planning, and it ranks among the largest hydropower displacements of early Communist China. Families were dispersed to new homes, and the ancestral landscape that had organized their lives — fields, shrines, market towns and graves — was abandoned wholesale.

Crucially, Shicheng was not razed in advance as many doomed towns were. Whether by haste, indifference to its heritage value, or the sheer scale of the undertaking, the city was abandoned and allowed to drown intact in 1959. The water rose over its walls, archways and rooftops, and the Lion City passed out of sight and, for decades, very nearly out of memory — surviving only in the recollections of the displaced and in old county records until divers found it again.

Contributing Factors

What Surfaces

Shicheng has resurfaced not through drought but through diving. The site was relocated and explored by divers in 2001, who found that the cold, dark, low-oxygen water — and the absence of sun, wind and rain — had preserved the city to a degree impossible above ground. Carved archways, city walls, stone staircases, lions and dragons, and even fragile wooden beams and painted detail were found largely intact, the stonework free of the weathering that would long since have erased it on land.

Around 2011 the sunken city was designated a protected historical relic by Zhejiang Province, and photographs of its preserved carvings spread worldwide, cementing its reputation as "China's Atlantis." Lying between roughly 26 and 40 metres down, the city became a destination for technical divers and the subject of underwater surveys, photographic projects and documentary filming. The depth and darkness that protected the ruins also make access demanding, so the city remains the preserve of trained divers rather than casual visitors.

Its preservation has also raised the question of how to protect and present it. Authorities and developers have floated ideas ranging from conservation and 3D digital mapping to enclosed viewing tunnels or submersible tours, while diving operators offer limited guided access. For the descendants of those resettled in 1959, the rediscovery has carried an added meaning, restoring a tangible link to a homeland most never saw. The drowned city thus occupies an unusual place — at once a lost settlement, an archaeological resource, a tourist curiosity and a potential underwater museum still resting where it sank.

Lessons

References

• Shicheng (underwater city) Wikipedia
• Qiandao Lake Wikipedia
• Xinan River Reservoir Encyclopaedia Britannica