Baiheliang is a natural giant Liang Shi with a length of about 1600 m and a width of about 16 m, which is located in the center of the Yangtze River in the north of Fuling, Chongqing. For thousands of years, Liang Shi has accumulated more than 65,438,000 precious inscriptions, including "Fu Yuan Fu Gengchen Weng Lai" written by Huang Tingjian, a calligrapher in the Northern Song Dynasty. Due to the Three Gorges Project, the inscription of Baiheliang will sink to the bottom of the river forever. However, the recent establishment of an underwater museum with the inscription of Liang Shi as the core has made this "underwater forest of steles" safe from now on. Baiheliang has been submerged under the Yangtze River for many years. Before the impoundment of the Three Gorges Project, it was exposed in the dry season of alternating winter and spring every year. According to legend, Zhu Zhenren in Tang Dynasty practiced here, and after attaining the Tao, he went to Hexian, hence the name "Baiheliang".
From the first year of Tang Guangde (AD 763), the ancient working people carved stone fish as water traces on Baiheliang to record the change of low water and predict the prosperity of agriculture, which provided excellent physical evidence for studying the hydrology of the Yangtze River and regional climate change. Therefore, Baiheliang is praised by UNESCO as "the only well-preserved ancient hydrological station in the world". The ancients said that "the weather is good and the stone fish comes out of the water." It is speculated that it is these stone fish that attract many sculptors. Famous calligraphers, literati and local officials of past dynasties remembered the past, praised the present and recorded their feelings, leaving this national treasure over time. The inscription on Baiheliang is about 220m long and15m wide. The inscriptions accumulated for thousands of years include 174, 165 and more than 10,000 words of * *. Among them, Huang Tingjian, a famous writer, calligrapher and great poet in the Northern Song Dynasty, wrote the most precious inscription "Fu Yuan Fu Gengchen Weng Lai", and Wang Shizhen, a famous writer in the Qing Dynasty, also left precious handwriting. After the start of the Three Gorges Project, how to protect the inscription of Baiheliang, which is more than 1200 years ago, has become one of the top priorities of the cultural relics department. In April of 20001year, Ge Xiurun, an academician of China Academy of Engineering and a professor of Shanghai Jiaotong University, put forward the protection scheme of "pressure-free container", which was approved by National Cultural Heritage Administration and officially confirmed as the protection scheme for the inscription of Baiheliang. In February 2003, Ge Xiurun broke ground on the "Underwater Palace" tailored for Baiheliang.
"Pressure-free container" is the core of the whole Baiheliang Underwater Museum. The underwater protector is a single-span arch shell structure with an oval plane, and the shell structure is covered with "White Crane Beam Inscription". By replacing the clear water of the Yangtze River in the filter shell and matching it with a powerful light source, the requirements for tourists to see the stone carvings clearly can be met. The principle of "pressureless container" is that the white crane beam is covered by the container, and the water in the container is connected with the Yangtze River water outside the container, resulting in the same water pressure inside and outside. Because the internal and external pressures can offset each other, there is no pressure inside the "underwater palace". In addition, the shell will also protect the inscription from siltation and erosion.
Academician Ge Xiurun said that the reason why the inscription of Baiheliang is very well protected depends on water. It is precisely because the inscription is underwater all the year round that it will be preserved relatively intact. On the contrary, if the white crane beam is exposed to the air, it will be easily weathered. Therefore, preserving the original ecological environment is the best way to protect it, using the original ecological Yangtze River water. Ge Xiurun revealed in a telephone interview with a reporter from the News of the World that the underwater museum project was forced to stop work for more than two years due to financial problems, and the Three Gorges Reservoir stored water ahead of schedule, which made the project time relatively tight. Huang Dejian, director of Fuling District Museum, said that before the scheme of 200 1 pressure-free container was determined, the cultural relics protection department thought there was no way to keep the inscription of Baiheliang. In order to preserve the original appearance of the inscription to the greatest extent, local museums and cultural relics management offices began to prepare "afterlife" for the inscription of Bai Heliang. They spent several months camping on the White Crane Beam and turned all the inscriptions on it into inverted molds with silica gel. In this way, even if the inscription of Baiheliang is submerged forever, these counter-molds can be used as positive molds for people to watch. With the completion of the world's first underwater museum, the White Crane Beam, which was originally only seen in the dry season, is expected to be visible all year round.