水连东

Shui Lian Dong - Water Curtain Cave

水连东 (Shui Lian Dong, Water Curtain Cave) is a very common name in China, if you search on Google Maps, you can find hundreds of them. So why is this name so popular and common? Its quite simple, it is an obvious name for a cave when a waterfall is involved, the waterfall is the "water curtain". And there are different kinds of waterfall related caves, and they all are called Water Curtain Cave:

• Caves Behind Waterfalls: The obvious waterfall cave is an erosional cave behind the water, which is eroded from the rock by the retrograde erosion of the water, typically at the level of the plunge pool. We actually have a geological term defined for this kind of waterfall cave.
• Tufa Deposits: There are waterfalls which formed by the deposition of limestone, which is called tufa, and those tufa deposits often have small caves inside.
• Biggest Underground Waterfalls: There are caves which have a waterfall inside, cave rivers are not special, but spectacular waterfalls are.
• There are all kinds of artificial subterranea, where water rushes from an opening and creates a waterfall inside.
• There is a cultural sort of waterfall cave, this is a name from the famous Chinese novel Journey to the West, and since centuries people try to build a copy and calle it Water Curtain Cave. Sun Wukong nominated himself to be the monkey that would rush through the Mount Huaguo’s great waterfall to see what was behind it. He discovered the cave behind and leapt back through the waterfall. Mount Hugao and the cave are fictional, but Mount Huaguo in Jiangsu was probably the inspiration.

The name is even more common as restaurants, hotels, parks, companies and much more are named so, even if there is no waterfall at all.

• Huangguoshu Waterfall Water Curtain Cave
• Shui Lian Dong
• Shui Lian Dong
• Shui Lian Dong

• See also
• Search DuckDuckGo for "Water Curtain Cave"
• Mount Huaguo - Wikipedia