COLUMN ONE : China Has a Treasure in Its Caves : Country’s underground passageways are the ultimate challenge for spelunkers--and a lure for profiteers.

The entrance to hell for claustrophobes and heaven for geologists starts here at the base of a brush-covered mountain where a chest-high stream of water runs right into the bowels of the Earth.

Like a modern-day Orpheus, Guan Yuanxing wades into the brook, ducks his head beneath a rocky overhang barely a foot above the water’s surface and gets swallowed up by the hillside--to emerge in a world few people know exists and fewer yet have ever seen, a massive subterranean vault of wonders illuminated only by the miner’s lamp pulled down low on his forehead.

Huge stalactites hang from the ceiling, droplets of water dangling precariously from their pointy tips. Delicate rock formations, shaped like tiny broccoli florets, hide in crevices along the walls. Aquamarine waters tumble off ledges and gather into pools of liquid glass.

Silent passageways lead to even more delights beyond, sealed away in chambers that probably slept undisturbed, in darkness blacker than pitch, for countless millenniums until Guan first stumbled on the cave four years ago.

His discovery is just one of this country’s many underground treasure-troves. Through an accident of geology and geography, China is home to more caves than the rest of the world put together, turning the Middle Kingdom into a powerful draw for scientists and spelunkers--or cavers, as many prefer to be called--from across the globe, eager to chart the unknown.

“China is to cavers what the Himalayas are to mountaineers,” declared Andy Eavis, an Englishman who has led caving expeditions to China for nearly 20 years. “It’s the ultimate challenge.”

The country’s extravagance of riches below the surface stems from its huge deposits of limestone and water, the two key elements in forming caves. Those ingredients combined over eons to turn China into a web of caves estimated to number in the tens of thousands.

“There’s everything there: big ones, long ones, deep ones,” Eavis said. “Probably less than 10% of all the caves in China have been properly mapped.”

But the wonders that took millions of years to produce are coveted not just by cavers such as Eavis, who leave them intact, but also by profiteers out to earn a quick buck.

In the past decade, a rising traffic in stalagmites, the cones that grow from the ground up, and stalactites has alarmed scientists and environmentalists working to preserve China’s geological patrimony. Armed with hacksaws and chisels, poor Chinese farmers often raid nearby caves and plunder their contents. Crates full of precious rock formations have been shipped both legally and illegally out of the country to collectors and dealers worldwide, particularly enthusiasts in eastern Asia who use them in landscaping and decorating.

In 1992 alone, the last year for which statistics are available, more than 32 tons of stalactites crossed the border, according to official reports and customs figures. Inadequate laws and even spottier enforcement have made protecting China’s underground marvels from pilferers all the more difficult.

Many thieves don’t understand the true value of their loot. “If a tree is cut down, it can grow back in 10 years,” said Xiong Kangning, a speleologist at Guizhou Normal University in southern China. “But stalagmites and stalactites can’t grow back in even 100,000 years if they are damaged.”

Commercialization too has taken its toll, leading to tussles between environmentalists and local authorities hoping to turn their caves into tourist attractions to bring in revenue to their depressed towns.

Such sites can be lucrative enterprises. In the city of Guilin, a booming tourist spot visited last year by President Clinton, the spacious Reed Flute Cave, used as a bomb shelter during World War II, nets more than $3 million annually from 1 million visitors--twice as many as go through Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the longest mapped cave system (330 miles) in the world.

Here in Yangshuo, near Guilin, buses converge daily on Dragon Pond Cave, where mostly domestic tourists eat up the garish neon lighting and extra touches like recorded animal sounds to emphasize resemblances between certain rock formations and various animals--additions that strike Westerners accustomed to more natural displays as tacky.

Indeed, some of the sites offer experiences more akin to “Pirates of the Caribbean” than to a hushed glimpse of natural splendor. Mechanized wax figures populate the caves at Jiuxiang Scenic Resort, in southwestern China, and act out a rather gruesome local legend, including one scene in which two demons use a cleaver to behead a man.

The vast majority of China’s caves remain undeveloped. Most of the caves are clustered in the southern half of the nation, where some of the country’s poorest peasant farmers live.

Theft and destruction of cave contents are especially acute around Guilin and Yangshuo, in a region of Guangxi province fabled for its spectacular scenery, a patchwork of dazzling emerald rice paddies and sheer limestone cliffs called karst peaks that jut abruptly out of the ground like teeth.

The landscape in this area has been immortalized in Chinese painting since dynastic times. It is also a fertile breeding ground for caves of all shapes and sizes, more than 3,000 of them nestled in an area of about 1,200 square miles.

Their mouths range from gaping maws to cracks too narrow to squeeze through. Zhu Xuewen, a geologist in Guilin who is perhaps China’s foremost expert on caves, has entered and explored dozens of caves in the area and in other parts of China.

In 1977, Zhu helped establish China’s Speleological Research Institute, an organization with more than 1,000 members today. Like most aficionados, Zhu waxes almost lyrical about the scientific value of the world beneath his feet. Besides their geological and mineralogical interest, caves can yield valuable information to biologists, anthropologists and scholars in other fields.

Organisms that can live without light, similar to those found on the ocean floor, have been discovered in caves. In mountain caverns on the island of New Guinea, north of Australia, explorers found small crustaceans and insects whose only known ancestors lie deep in the ocean, evidence that the island was created by uplift from the sea bottom.

Fossils are abundant, a paleontologist’s dream. So, sometimes, are human artifacts, left behind by ancient settlers who stopped inside for shelter. Inside one cave on an expedition in the central province of Sichuan, Eavis stumbled across traces of rudimentary homes, a saltpeter factory and a coil of rotted vine rope from times long gone.

“The chance of getting into a chamber that was last visited a couple of thousand years ago is quite high,” he said. “The possibility is always there.”

Even the speleothems--the stalactites, stalagmites and other rock formations--provide more than just aesthetic pleasure.

“Stalactites and stalagmites store information just as trees do about their ages,” Zhu said. “They can record periods of drought, moisture and temperature fluctuations over long periods of time--for hundreds of thousands of years. They’re a database of natural conditions.”

Some formations are so small and fragile that the breeze of someone walking by quickly or the slightest touch of a hand can ruin them, Zhu said.

The beauty of the larger speleothems is often breathtaking. In Guan’s cave, which he has paid the local government about $1,500 for the right to run as a tourist site, the rock formations cascade down in sheets like folded satin, rise up from the floor in bulbous pillars, line the walls like organ pipes, or resemble all manner of vegetables--onions, carrots, broccoli--and, in larger flights of fancy, animals.

The variety makes them sought-after ornaments. At one Yangshuo hotel, the souvenir shop openly advertises “rock crystals,” which the manager, Yang Guoqing, eagerly showed a visitor.

He pulled out a fairly hefty stalactite--about 20 inches long, brown and white with pearly growths down the sides--and quoted a price: 350 yuan, or slightly more than $40.

“My father specializes in these rocks,” Yang said. “Whenever we find a cave, we bury it to hide it from other people and then extract the stuff inside exclusively for our family.”

Sales, he acknowledged, have been tighter this year because of stepped-up policing of such trade--enforcement that seems to come in fits and starts. But the brown-and-white piece can easily make it out of the country “as long as it’s not too big,” Yang assured his visitor.

“A lot of people are buying rocks now,” he said. “It used to be just the Taiwanese and folks from Macao, but more and more foreigners are buying them.”

If Yang seems a little fuzzy on the law, it is because the law regulating mining of cave treasures is itself vague. When the Chinese government drafted legislation several years ago protecting the country’s geological heritage, Zhu proposed several specific provisions related to caves. Those provisions were ultimately cut out, he said.

Most of the cave miners around Guilin are poor peasants struggling to supplement their meager living. In one reported incident, villagers raided a local cave and stripped it clean of salable rocks in three weeks, all for a booty of $4,500.

The Guilin municipal government has tried since the early 1970s to prohibit trade in speleothems, but enforcement has been sporadic, according to official media. The latest bulletin about the ban was posted this past spring.

Zhu’s hope is that education about their preciousness might safeguard China’s subterranean wonders. In June, Chinese Central Television, the official national TV network, showcased Zhu and his exploration work in a half-hour program titled “Love Our Stalactites.”

But such education may have to begin closer to home. Members of the speleology institute were shocked recently when they discovered that their own museum gift shop, licensed out to an independent vendor, was selling stalactites and stalagmites.

Don Coons, an American who has participated in three expeditions to China, said many of the town squares in Guizhou province, an area rich in caves, have fountain displays featuring rock formations taken from underground--even at the offices of the local officials who issue permits for foreign caving expeditions. That “was especially poignant,” Coons said.

State funding for domestic exploration teams is low, forcing Chinese scholars to rely on joint projects with cavers from overseas, who come from as far away as Spain and Yugoslavia. The Chinese also depend on their foreign counterparts to bring in caving equipment, because there are no domestic manufacturers or shops offering such items.

To generate income, the institute occasionally advises tourism authorities on how to develop caves as attractions. Experts estimate that China has a few hundred caves open for business.

While eager to spread awareness of China’s treasures below ground, conservationists harbor mixed feelings about opening the caves for public consumption.

“Once a cave is explored, it is damaged,” said Xiong, the speleologist at Guizhou Normal University. “Opening new caves and protecting them is a contradiction.”

Intentionally or not, humans alter the caves’ environment, often simply by breathing, which releases alien bacteria into the cave and increases the concentration of carbon dioxide. Shoes and clothing can introduce seeds from outside, which sprout into vegetation encouraged by even the most subdued lighting.

But one reality comforts speleologists: China has so many caves that only a fraction have been discovered or charted, and only a fraction of those have been plundered beyond hope.

“In England, they’ve burrowed into every last crevice--they have no more caves to explore. It will be several decades before China reaches that level,” Zhu said.

“We have plenty of caves which can’t be ruined by people.”