Guizhou Sells Cool Caves as a Summer Tourism Product

A waterfall cafe in Anshun, Guizhou, sells a 68-yuan ticket that includes a drink. A paddleboard tour of Shilong Cave in Qingzhen costs 1,280 yuan ($190).

As of Aug. 11, the Qingzhen trip had no open slots until Aug. 31, according to CBN View checks on booking sites. Guizhou is packaging cave air that stays near 16 degrees Celsius as a summer product, and cafes are the version that spreads on video.

A 16-Degree Cave Ticket Sells Out Early

On Aug. 11, CBN View found the Shilong Cave package in Qingzhen, Guiyang, priced at 1,280 yuan for adults and children alike, with the next free date Aug. 31. Sansheng Cave in Xingyi was 499 yuan, with paddleboarding, a via ferrata, a science talk and tea, and the next slot Aug. 22. General’s Cave, also in Xingyi, was 698 yuan, next open Aug. 25.

Chen Lei, who runs General’s Cave for Guizhou Bigfoot Cave Exploration Tourism Co., told CBN View the site was taking more than 400 guests a day this summer, with a peak of 450, and daily take of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan. The cave opened on June 30, 2025. He said passenger flow and inquiries in summer 2026 were up 200 percent from a year earlier, and more than 95 percent of guests came from other provinces.

A Guangzhou office worker planning a family trip told CBN View she had budgeted about 3,000 yuan for three people and still could not find a date. Another traveler who did get into an Xingyi cave said she spent about 2,300 yuan including a hired car, because the caves sit far from town, and that she only grabbed three tickets at 10 p.m. after hunting leftover slots.

Nikkei Asia reported that the 1,280-yuan tours drew about 13,000 visitors in 2025, with more than 90 percent coming from outside the area. The waitlist is the business working as designed. Empty rock photographs better than a crowd, and a capped cave is easier to keep looking untouched.

Guizhou Wrote Caves Into Policy Last Year

Karst landforms cover more than 60 percent of the province, and China Daily said 42,800 cave mouths have been mapped. As of July 2025, Guizhou had 14 A-level scenic spots built around caves, including two national 5A sites and six 4A sites, according to public figures cited by CBN View.

In February 2025 the province issued a plan for classified management, ecological restoration and controlled use of cave resources. Xinhua, covering the Eco Forum Global Guiyang that July, cited incomplete figures putting a 1 billion yuan cave tourism market already in place. That is still a slice of the wider trade. Official provincial figures show 1.42 billion visits in 2024 and 1.8 trillion yuan in tourism income.

HOW THE CAVE TRADE WAS BUILT

1. 2015: Zhijindong Cave UNESCO Global Geopark completes its first full laser scan of the caverns.
2. 2018: Veteran cavers Song Yuanqiao and Zhao Fei say cave trips still draw little public interest.
3. 2019: Zhijindong adds a live system that tracks temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide and guest flow.
4. 2023: Song says inquiries jump as first-time tourists start asking for routes.
5. February 2025: Guizhou issues its classified cave-management plan.
6. June 30, 2025: General’s Cave opens in Xingyi.
7. Late April 2026: A cafe-plus-climbing site at Yanzidong, or Sparrow Cave, in Guiding County begins trial operation.

The same stable air that sells coffee is already used for other work. Xinhua said some caves now hold restaurants, bars and homestays, while others are used for winemaking, mushroom growing, or data storage. Qin Xiaokang, deputy director of Libo County’s culture, radio, television and tourism bureau, told Xinhua the caverns “are no longer just natural wonders, but also cultural and economic symbols.”

At Forest Coolpark in Libo, inside the South China Karst UNESCO site, general manager Ren Peng said caving, sightseeing, camping and hotpot had been added to match the terrain. Since the May Day holiday in 2025, he said, the site had taken in nearly 10,000 tourists and more than 7 million yuan. “We preserve the caves’ natural features while designing tour routes, and avoid any construction in deeper sections,” Ren said. “All waste is strictly managed and removed from the caves daily.”

What a Day in Shilong Cave Costs

Shilong Cave sits in Maige township in Qingzhen, about an hour from Guiyang. For 1,280 yuan a guest gets a guided trip through a water cave with travertine dams and stepped calcite pools, often with a paddleboard on the underground lake, and a medal at the end, according to a September 2025 dispatch on Soft Earth Dreams and listings on Klook and Trip.com. China Daily’s sister posts put the air inside at 17 degrees Celsius on hot days. A Chinese-language post from a Guizhou promoter put it at 16 degrees in the rock.

The site takes one to two groups a day and, the Soft Earth Dreams dispatch said, leaves no trash behind, both to protect the cave and to keep the setting clean for check-in photos. That cap is why a ticket that costs more than many Chinese domestic day trips still disappears weeks ahead. Viral clips tagged “Guizhou cave exploration” have drawn more than 5 million likes, China Daily reported, with related topics hitting hundreds of millions of views.

Song Yuanqiao and Zhao Fei, cavers with rescue experience, run the Yanzidong project in Guiding. They went to Hungary and Spain to study route design, industrial codes and safety rules, China Daily said, after years of treating caving as a niche hobby. “We never imagined it would become so popular,” Song said. A cafe now sits at the cave mouth, with climbing routes deeper in. Since trial operation in late April 2026, the site has drawn more than 2,000 visitors.

Wu Liyun, a professor at the China Culture and Tourism Industry Research Institute of Beijing International Studies University, told CBN View the boom has three drivers: young travelers want a physical challenge, stalactites and dark rivers are scarce to look at, and cave coffee gives the trip something to post. She also warned operators not to clone the same show in every hole.

Coffee Under a Waterfall for 68 Yuan

The cheap ticket is the one built for a phone. In Xiuwen County, Guiyang, Guizhou native Peng Wei came back from Shenzhen and opened Xiu Café in a karst cave with former classmates, Xinhua reported in February 2026. By August, People’s Daily said tourists were lining up for waterfall-cooled coffee and the cafe was selling up to 600 cups a day at peak. One cave cafe stays around 16 degrees Celsius, the paper said, so guests can drink, browse books and sit under limestone without an air conditioner.

It felt like stepping back in time, and all the noise faded away.

Chang Ting, visitor from Xi’an, speaking to China Daily

Chang had walked about 100 meters along a narrow path until her phone lost signal, China Daily reported on Aug. 18. That blackout is part of the pitch. State accounts have been repeating the same pictures through mid-August. China’s ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, posted a cafe clip on July 22 with a one-line caption asking who would not want to sit in a cave cafe in summer.

https://x.com/AmbXieFeng/status/2080074662814380191

In Anshun the provincial culture and tourism bureau has been promoting Umber Coffee, a cave cafe with a waterfall, mist, hand-brewed coffee and glass treehouse views. Travel notes on Trip.com put a ticket at about 68 yuan with a drink included and describe a 20-meter fall that cuts the air by about 5 degrees Celsius the moment it hits.

https://x.com/amazingguizhou2/status/2022306224197571045

Those two products share a cave and split a market. Sixty-eight yuan buys a seat and a cup. 1,280 yuan buys a helmet, a dark lake and a rationed group. Both sell the same air.

Guides Came Home for 5,000 Yuan a Month

The payroll is local even when the guests are not. At Shilong Cave, guide Wang Ping, 30, went home after a city job in liquor sales, according to the Soft Earth Dreams dispatch from a September 2025 trip with Singapore agency Shan China Tours. He put cave tourism employment at about 80 local guides, with monthly pay averaging 5,000 yuan, and said the trips had lifted sales of farm goods and filled homestays.

WHO GETS PAID WHEN THE CAVE FILLS

• Local guides: About 80 people work Shilong Cave routes, at around 5,000 yuan a month, per Wang Ping.
• Out-of-province guests: More than 95 percent of General’s Cave visitors come from other provinces, Chen Lei said.
• Cafe volume: Xiu Café in Xiuwen sells up to 600 cups a day at peak, People’s Daily said.
• Libo cave park: Forest Coolpark took in more than 7 million yuan from nearly 10,000 guests after May Day 2025, its manager said.

UP Guizhou, a provincial promotion account, posted a clip of Spanish freestyle footballer Javier at Shilong Cave in early August in which he said tourism was bringing new life so villagers no longer needed to leave home to make a living. Jean Bottazzi, a French caver who represents the French Federation of Speleology in China and has spent more than 30 years on Shuanghedong Cave in Suiyang County, the longest mapped cave in Asia, told Xinhua that careful development can keep the rock intact and still create village jobs.

Zhou Wenlong, deputy director of the Guizhou Institute of Mountain Resources, said crews now use terrestrial laser scanning to build 3D models and to offer virtual access where the rock is too fragile for a crowd. Liu Haibo, general manager of Guizhou Zhijindong Cave Tourism Development Co., said the geopark’s 2015 scan will be repeated in 2026 so staff can see whether each stalactite is growing or damaged and change the route if it is.

Caves Grow Too Slowly to Copy-Paste

The South China Karst World Heritage listing, which includes Libo, already treats people as a management problem. UNESCO’s file flags visitor pressure on karst sites, along with farming and town growth, and calls for catchment-wide water protection and a hard line against damage from tourism. The IUCN World Heritage Outlook still rates the threat as low, even as tourism has become a pillar industry in parts of the property. A UNEP-WCMC datasheet on the same listing notes that heavy cave tourism can also threaten underground species.

Chen Lei said his company would rather bend a path than cut the original rock, and that General’s Cave dropped the colored lighting common in older show caves in favor of warm light and white light. He also said he is not afraid of more caves opening, because more operators make the activity familiar. Wu Liyun’s view is colder. She told CBN View that copying the same mix of paddleboards, coffee and iron rungs will flatten the product, and that lighting, walkways and breath from a crowd can change a cave’s microclimate.

THE LIMITS WU LIYUN PUT ON THE BOOM

• Head count: Set a scientific carrying capacity so extra feet do not crack formations or destabilize the rock.
• Light and kit: Write rules that balance lamps and walkways against the cave’s own temperature and humidity.
• Local law: Bring commercial caves under regulation instead of leaving each operator to invent a standard.

Caves accrete on a timescale no booking calendar uses. That is why the 1,280-yuan product is scarce on purpose, and why a 68-yuan cafe at the mouth is easier to scale than a route through living stone.

Cave Adventure Still Has No National Rulebook

Wu Liyun told CBN View that trips involving rappelling and stream walking count as adventure tourism, and that China still has no unified national standards for this work. She said Guizhou could write local rules first, covering who is allowed in, what gear is required, what certificates guides must hold, and how many people a cave can take. Guides, she said, should carry both an outdoor-instructor credential with a cave endorsement and a first-aid certificate, with a full emergency plan on file.

Song and Zhao already went to Europe to borrow those codes for Yanzidong. Zhijindong already watches carbon dioxide in real time. Shilong already runs one or two groups a day. The gap Wu flagged is that none of that is required everywhere a 499-yuan ticket is sold. Caves hold a steady temperature all year, which is why they work in August, and why a sloppy operator can keep selling slots long after the rock has started to change.