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The Guge Kingdom Evaporates under the Sun (Part II) 


The Guge people lived their every-day life in cave dwellings. The overall arrangement of cave dwellings are quite simple. The cave has a main room that includes a mud stove, niche and a storeroom. Most of the cave dwellings have one or two bedrooms and one living room. Few of them have three bedrooms.

Even in peacetime when people lived a happy life, the Guge kingdom was alert to the turbulent surrounding area.

Forts and perimeter walls could be seen everywhere from the opening at the bottom of the slope to the palace on the summit. Some of the two-story mud buildings have gun emplacement in the walls of the ground floor, serving as bunkers. The fortifications of the Guge kingdom are carefully designed and distributed. Forts and walls are located in the most advantageous places and closely correspond to each other in every direction, forming a wonderful three-dimensional defensive system, even by today’s standards.

Under this group of buildings runs a network of secret underground tunnels named “Winter Palace” by archeologists. The tunnels wind downhill. In the tunnels are a series of caves, watch holes, and small windows. The network is quite complicated with rooms in rooms and caves in caves. The tunnels played a very important role in the Guge kingdom’s defensive wars.

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