Ancient World Atlas
Lost Worlds · Qiandao Lake, Chun'an County, Zhejiang, China

Shi Cheng (Lion City)

A Ming-Qing walled city deliberately drowned in 1959 — and preserved almost perfectly

Mainstream: Founded c. AD 621 (Tang dynasty); walls and gates largely Ming-Qing; flooded 1959Alternative: Marketed as 'China's Atlantis' — an ancient mystery, though it drowned within living memory29.61°, 118.96°
Lost Worlds

At a glance

Shi Cheng (Lion City)
Photo: Nihaopaul · CC BY-SA 3.0

Shi Cheng, the 'Lion City', sits 26 to 40 metres beneath Qiandao (Thousand Island) Lake in Zhejiang province. It is not an ancient mystery: in 1959 the Chinese government dammed the Xin'an River for hydroelectric power, relocated roughly 290,000 people, and let the rising reservoir swallow the valley — including Shi Cheng, founded in the Tang dynasty around AD 621, and the even older He Cheng, established as a county seat in AD 208. Rediscovered by divers in 2001, the city proved astonishingly intact: five city gates, Ming and Qing dynasty stone archways, carved lions, dragons and phoenixes, and even wooden beams and staircases, all shielded from wind, sun and rain by cold fresh water.

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The mainstream view

What archaeology says

Historians know Shi Cheng's story in unusual detail because it happened in the modern era. The walled county town at the foot of Wu Shi (Five Lion) Mountain was a functioning community until the late 1950s, when the Xin'anjiang Reservoir project — one of the People's Republic's flagship hydroelectric schemes — flooded the valley. The submergence was documented bureaucracy, not legend: residents were resettled, and the town was left standing as the water rose.

The city was largely forgotten until 2001, when the local tourism bureau and diving operators began exploring the lake bed. Dives and a widely publicised National Geographic feature revealed remarkable preservation: intact walls, memorial archways (paifang) with crisp relief carvings dated to the Ming and Qing dynasties, and timber structures that would have rotted or burned long ago on land. Chinese authorities have since restricted casual diving and debated protection measures, including proposals for submersible tourism, while surveys continue to map the site.

For archaeologists, Shi Cheng's chief scientific value is as a preservation experiment. It demonstrates what several decades in cold, still, low-oxygen fresh water does to masonry and wood — a direct analogue for evaluating older drowned sites, and a caution that underwater preservation can be dramatically better than terrestrial survival.

Key evidence cited
  • The flooding is fully documented: the Xin'an River hydroelectric project of 1959 created Qiandao Lake and displaced roughly 290,000 residents
  • Historical records place Shi Cheng's founding in the Tang dynasty (c. AD 621) and He Cheng's county status in AD 208
  • Dive surveys since 2001 have photographed five city gates, wall circuits and dozens of Ming-Qing memorial archways with dated inscriptions and carvings
  • Preserved wooden beams, banisters and door frames confirm the exceptional preservation conditions of cold, low-oxygen fresh water
  • Former residents relocated in the 1950s have corroborated the town's layout and identified buildings from dive footage
  • The architectural style — paifang arches, lion and phoenix reliefs — matches standard late imperial Chinese county-town construction
The alternative view

What the skeptics propose

Shi Cheng is the most honest test case in the entire sunken-cities genre, because there is no mystery whatsoever about how it drowned — and yet it is persistently marketed as 'China's Atlantis'. Headlines routinely imply an ancient enigma, sometimes calling it a 1,400-year-old lost city as though it vanished in antiquity, when in fact it was flooded by engineers in 1959 and there are people alive today who walked its streets.

Alternative-history writers use Shi Cheng in two opposite ways. Some cite its stunning preservation to argue that genuinely ancient submerged cities could survive recognisably for millennia — if a wooden staircase lasts sixty years underwater, they ask, why not stone architecture for ten thousand? Others in the sceptical camp use it to expose how easily the 'underwater city' aesthetic manufactures mystery: eerie green light and drowned gateways trigger Atlantis associations regardless of actual age.

Its real lesson for the debate cuts both ways. Shi Cheng shows that underwater preservation can indeed be excellent — but it also shows that fresh, still reservoir water is nothing like the destructive, sediment-laden, storm-raked shallows of the open sea, where most claimed prehistoric sunken cities are said to lie. Anyone arguing that an Ice Age coastal city should look as crisp as the Lion City is comparing a sealed time capsule with a demolition zone.

Key evidence cited
  • The 'China's Atlantis' branding pervades international coverage, often blurring the 1959 flooding into an impression of ancient loss
  • Lost-civilisation writers cite Shi Cheng's preservation to argue that far older drowned cities could survive intact on sea floors worldwide
  • Viral photo essays present the drowned gates and carvings without dates, letting readers assume deep antiquity
  • The city's rediscovery narrative — 'forgotten for decades, found by divers' — mirrors and reinforces classic lost-city tropes
  • Some accounts inflate the site into a chain of multiple mysterious underwater cities beneath the lake (He Cheng and smaller drowned villages do exist, but all flooded in 1959)

Genuinely open questions

  1. How can the timber and carved stonework be protected as reservoir conditions, tourism pressure and water chemistry change?
  2. Should the site be developed for controlled tourist access — submersibles, floating tunnels have been proposed — or left undisturbed?
  3. What exactly survives of He Cheng and the smaller drowned villages elsewhere beneath Qiandao Lake?
  4. What does the differential decay of wood, mortar and stone at Shi Cheng imply for interpreting genuinely ancient submerged sites at sea?

Worth knowing

Divers found wooden staircases and beams still solid after decades underwater — in a city young enough that its former residents could review the dive footage and point out their old neighbourhoods.