CHINA 5A TRAVEL
Boat 2.8 km down the world's longest navigable underground river — a 12°C lit-karst marvel in Liaoning bundled with dry cave, geology museum and petrified-wood park.
Benxi Water Cave (本溪水洞) is a flooded karst cavern in the Changbai outlying hills above the Taizi River, roughly 26–35 km east of Benxi city in Liaoning — a system the dissolving power of water spent some 400,000–500,000 years carving through Ordovician limestone. About 5,800 metres of passage have been explored, and since a 2018 world-record certification the cave has carried the title of the longest underground river you can tour continuously by boat anywhere on Earth. The stream was long ago poetically named the Nine-Bend Silver River (九曲银河), its route mapped by the old texts as 'Three Gorges, Seven Palaces, Nine Bends'.
The experience is amphibious and famously cool. A grand welcome chamber tall enough to hold a thousand people opens onto a 300-metre dry cave of low passages and prehistoric-life tableaux, then down to an underground harbor where electric boats slip onto water that holds a steady 12°C (54°F) in every season. The 2.8-km drift — twenty to forty unhurried minutes — passes more than a hundred named sights: the Corn Pagoda, the Snow Mountain, the Lotus Lantern with its rare worm-textured stalactites, and the Jade Elephant Playing in Water, billed as the treasure of the cave. The river averages 1.5 m deep, runs at 14,000 tonnes a day without ever freezing, and the stalactites overhead grow just 0.13 cm a century.
Opened to visitors on May 1, 1983, the cave became a national scenic area in 1994 and Benxi's first 5A attraction on July 13, 2015, stacking honors from first Asian member of the International Show Caves Association to 'China's Most Beautiful Tourist Cave' — some eight million visitors from 120 countries, among them around 40 heads of state, have already made the drift. The park around it layers on a genuinely strong geology museum, a kingdom of 130–180-million-year-old petrified trees, forest trails and a riverside campsite, while the wider county — China's 'Maple Leaf Capital' — turns late September to mid-October into red-gold maple country with hot springs to soak in afterward.
Highlights
The Nine-Bend Silver River
The signature drift: board an electric boat at the underground harbor and glide 2.8 km through 'Three Gorges, Seven Palaces, Nine Bends' — the world's longest continuous boat tour on an underground river.
Jade Elephant Playing in Water
The formation guides call the treasure of the cave — most lifelike of a hundred named sights, with the Corn Pagoda and Snow Mountain as its companions.
The Dry Cave — Ancient Life Palace
A 300-metre walk-through of low tunnels, the Ancient Well and Dragon Pool, staged with sound-and-light prehistoric exhibits — duck in places, or head straight for the dock.
Benxi Geology Museum
Included with entry: five halls and 3,300-plus specimens spanning 4.6 billion years, most of them dug from Liaoning's own fossil-rich strata.
Silicified Wood Kingdom
Hundreds of petrified tree trunks, 130–180 million years old and gathered from across China's north, laid out as an open-air fossil park on the tram loop.
Winter Rime at the Cave Mouth
When cave vapor meets sub-zero air, the trees around the entrance frost into hoarfrost — the area's signature winter sight, while the cave itself feels warm at 12°C.
Photo Gallery
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