Whether for enemies of America, rebels of legends, or droppers of acid, underground passageways make for some of the best stories on Earth.
Tunnel Vision
“Lower Gaza” made news recently as the labyrinth of underground tunnels used by Hamas to store weapons and hide from Israeli warfare above. This should come as no surprise. Tunnels have been trafficking secrets along the planet for as long as shovels have been digging.
The covert corridors come in many shapes and sizes for myriad purposes. The Catacombs of Paris, pictured above, contain subterranean hallways made of human bones. Many if not most fortresses, such as England's Dover Castle, were built with defensive tunnels for flanking and escaping harm. Some underground communities, such as that of Demolition Man, survive on rat burgers and hide murder-death-killers.
Earth is riddled with underground passages used for warfare, escape from oppression, travel, and smuggling. Here is a snapshot of the most interesting tunnels throughout history.
1. Bund Sightseeing Tunnel
The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel is a premier tourist attraction in Shanghai today that features 707 yards of psychedelic multimedia effects: lights, video, audio, little blow-up dolls that stare blankly through your soul. The trippy underpass goes beneath the Huangpu River and breaks on through to the other side, Jim Morrison style.
For 50 yuan, they put you in an automated glass car with 360 degrees of bizarre sensory madness. Zhang Bin, a man who’s reportedly taken the trip over 10,000 times, told Time Out Shanghai, “The story is about going from space into the core of the Earth and out again. We couldn’t show the dirty Huangpu, which has no fish, so we went for something bigger and better. It’s the only tunnel like it in the world.”
According to this weird video above, it's definitely a one of a kind tunnel.
2. The Gunpowder Plot Tunnel
Screenshot: V for Vendetta via IMDb
Guy Fawkes and eleven cohorts famously botched their assassination attempt of England’s King James I when their attempt to explode Parliament’s House of Lords was discovered in 1605. Here’s how it went down.
Jimmy started wearing the crown in Protestant England when most Brits did not dig Catholicism. However, the new king’s wife and mother were both Catholic ladies, so rosary rubbers everywhere expected him to sympathize their plight and end their oppression.
It was not so. Jimmy was a pushover who increased sanctions on practicing Catholics in an effort to placate the Protestant extremists breathing down his neck. Catholics were required to attend Protestant services, and Mass was forced into secrecy. “Recusants” who practiced Catholicism publicly were fined.
Some Catholic rebels decided to end these shenanigans by exploding the king along with the entire House of Lords. Fawkes and friends allegedly tunnelled from a nearby rental house to the Palace of Westminster, where they transported 36 barrels of gunpowder to the undercroft beneath the House of Lords.
An anonymous letter warned one conspirator’s brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, not to attend the upcoming Parliament meeting. Monteagle gave the letter to authorities, and on November 4th, explosives expert Guy Fawkes was caught in the wrong cellar claiming himself “John Johnson” and wearing spurred boots for a swift escape. The gunpowder was later discovered hidden beneath some wood and coal.
Fawkes withstood torture for two days before giving up his cronies. In the following picture, it's difficult to tell which Guy Fawkes signature came before or after torture, but if you look really close you can hear him screaming.
Two days of torture gave the other conspirators enough time to flee, but they were chased down anyway. Three men died in a shootout. The other eight were arrested and then hanged, drawn, and quartered - a punishment dating to Medieval Ages that meant hanged until near death, castrated, disembowelled, beheaded, and then cut into fourths. Because Medieval people were nothing if not vicious dicks.
3. Cu Chi Tunnels
Saigon’s Cu Chi tunnels were the bane of existence for American soldiers during the Vietnam War. This complex spread of underground passages spans 130 miles and was a major reason the whole confrontation seemed like an exercise in futility.
The US carpet-bombed largely evacuated jungles for the better part of two decades, which often served to fell trees and waste American dollars more often than eradicate the enemy, thanks to these secret labyrinths.
The Viet Cong used Cu Chi tunnels for communication, supply routes, hospitals, barracks, and food and weapon caches. Worst of all, they used the hidden entrances for ambushes, which held potential anywhere and everywhere.
Being surrounded by Viet Cong was always probable, a terrifying reality that weighed heavily on US morale. Although most firearms proved futile at the mouth of a tunnel, the US learned that one weapon returned the terror with glowing efficiency: the flamethrower.
4. The Libby Prison Tunnel
One of the largest prison escapes on American soil happened during the Civil War at Richmond, Virginia’s Libby Prison, when 109 Union soldiers tunnelled their way to freedom on February 9, 1864.
Libby’s living conditions were so shitty the North used its stories as fuel for outrage. An 1863 article from the New York Times entitled “Horrors of Richmond Prisons” describes rampant “diarrhoea [sic], dysentery and typhoid pneumonia.” The article describes an increasing “per centage [sic] of deaths has greatly increased - the result of causes that have been long at work, such as insufficient food, clothing and shelter, combined with that depression of spirits brought on so often by long confinement.”
After thousands of soldiers died in the Confederate slammer, a brave few snuck into the rat-infested basement and dug for 17 days until resurfacing inside of a nearby tobacco shed beside the James River. Col. Rose famously told his men the “Underground Railroad to God’s Country is open!” Of the 109 soldiers who snuck out in the quiet of night, 59 reached Union lines, 48 were captured, and two drowned crossing the river.
5. The Large Hadron Collider
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator is located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is 16.7 miles of sophisticated underground tubing beneath France and Switzerland. Sporting a US$9 billion price tag, the LHC was completed in 2008 after twenty years of construction involving thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians. It is one of the largest scientific undertakings in history.
The LHC momentarily recreates the effects of the Big Bang by using superconducting magnets to accelerate particles until they approach the speed of light before smashing together. Computer grids in 35 countries analyze countless data on the mini explosions. CERN says the collision is “akin to firing two needles 10 kilometres apart with such precision that they meet halfway,” but even this is a vast understatement.
So far, the LHC has already proven its worth by discovering two particles that only existed in theory previously, most noteworthy: the Higgs Boson or “God Particle.” Although the collider is currently under a two-year revamping, its brief years of operation provided “100 petabytes of data” to analyze in the meantime, which equates to about “700 years' worth of HD-quality movies,” according to CERN. Mankind’s understanding of the universe depends on this newfangled widget.
6. The Berlin Wall Tunnels
After WWII, the former Nazi capital of Berlin was split in half. The Soviet Union controlled East Berlin, and West Berlin was under French, British, and American control. Relative to one another, West Berlin meant liberty - a growing metropolis of arts and freedom. East Berlin was a wasteland of communist oppression.
Many a tunnel was burrowed under the Berlin Wall to reunite separated families and escape the Soviet subjugation of East Berlin. One might assume that 20th century defectors could not easily be contained by such an ancient structure, but this was no half-assed fence.
The Berlin Wall was made of two, parallel reinforced concrete walls - twelve-foot tall, with around twenty yards of blank space in between. Each wall was adorned with electric barbed wire and signal wire, which alerted nearby guard towers when touched. The dead space in the middle, where Secret Police patrolled 24/7, was chemically removed of all plant life and raked daily so that any disturbance would leave evidence.
Fortunately for those in search of freedom, Berlin soil was incredibly sandy, wet, and easy to dig through. Although some defectors fled via hot-air balloons or fake passports, many more, like the heroes of Tunnel 57, crawled their way to freedom underground in tunnels ranging from 100 feet to over 500 feet. In the age before GPS, there was no telling where they would emerge, so digging was always a gamble of life and death.
“Altogether about 300 people managed to escape through tunnels,” NBC News estimates. “About 700-800 perished along the entire 856-mile length of the border” over the wall's 29 years of menace.
7. Roman Catacombs
Rome is home to miles of catacombs, underground burial tunnels that are rife with legends. The tunnels date back to the first century, when Jews began using them as cemeteries. Christians followed suit a century later and continued constructing a vast network under the entire city and beyond. Rumours have flourished since.
The Holy Grail is rumoured to be “underneath the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, near the tomb of St. Lawrence, a deacon martyred in A.D. 258.” National Geographic reports:
“According to a legend, Pope Sixtus II entrusted the Holy Grail to Lawrence to save it from the persecution of Emperor Valerian. The deacon put the chalice in a safe place - and perhaps even sent it to Spain - before being killed. Barbagallo thinks the Grail never left Rome and is currently buried in a tunnel under the basilica dedicated to St. Lawrence.”
The Catholic Church owns all Christian catacombs in Rome, so Vatican permission must be granted before anyone can look around. Although some tunnels are open to the public, the Church notoriously dislikes probing into its history, and access to most catacombs is difficult to attain.
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