Prowling an otherworldly underworld

The 5,000-square-meter Lion Square just inside one cavern's entrance takes its appellation from the big-cat-shaped stone guarding its opening. It occasionally hosts concerts, and is arguably one of the most exceptional features of Kunming's underground music scene, in every sense.

The Bat Cave, however, isn't named for the shapes of its formations - they all have their own respective anthropomorphic designations - but for the nocturnal flying mammals that once made it their home. Neither they - nor Bruce Wayne - can be found there today.

The cavern is, however, host to stalactites that curl like claws since they've been windswept by breezes for eons.

The subterranean Twin Waterfalls are likened to a pair of star-crossed lovers, who tragically leap from the crest to blend into one another in a churning pool below.

They gush near "Lover's Gorge", as Yincui Canyon is colloquially known, because local lovebirds used to croon ballads to each other from opposite sides. The tradition emulates a legend in which the Dragon King's third daughter and a local lad serenaded each other from its cliff tops.

Visitors don construction helmets to protect them from tumbling stones to raft along the Yincui River that rips over a kilometer through the mountains before it burrows into the honeycomb of caverns.

The stalactites that dribble down the precipices outside the entrance are compared to "dragons soaring toward the sky".

The 54-square-kilometer complex is a series of caves within caves, bored five tiers deep into the planet's crust.

A local saying goes: "You couldn't count the number of chambers in Jiuxiang in a lifetime." (Actually, there are about a hundred.)

Still, spelunkers can hike dozens in a couple of hours. They can also make the journey seated in bamboo sedan chairs.

The place is so much like a movie scene that it served as a shooting set for such films as Little Big Soldier, The Huada Chronicles: Blade of the Rose and The Myth.

This again proves how its entrances are gateways to worlds so ethereal that they seem to belong to the realm of fiction.

But visitors find they offer a chance to discover reality, albeit very different from above the surface.