"Once it's gone, it's gone," villager Wang Yuanlin says.

"We all wanted to protect the caves, but we didn't know how. We made appeals from one department to another."

Villagers handed a petition to the local government and searched the caves to find ceramic pieces from the Song Dynasty to demonstrate the site's importance.

But these didn't decisively persuade local decision-makers to stop expanding the quarries.

Sanming's gross annual regional production in 1999 was 21.7 billion yuan (equal to $2.6 billion then).

Sanming Steel Group's board chairman Li Lizhang estimated halting the quarries' expansion in the area would reduce limestone extraction by 40 to 50 million metric tons, causing losses grossing over 2 billion yuan.

The local government maintained a responsible attitude toward the site, and a "rescue" excavation began in September 1999.

"If there were critical relics, they had to be protected," says Yan Fengying, who was then Sanming's deputy mayor and was in charge of cultural-heritage protection.

"But if there weren't any, legal exploitation couldn't be forbidden."

An archaeological team led by Chen Ziwen, who was then a researcher at Fujian Museum, had to race against time.

The steelworks sponsored the excavation. But the agreement was valid for a month.

Whether or not the hills and caverns would be destroyed by detonations depended on whether or not a crucial discovery could be found in time. If any were there at all, that is.