Sydney, Australia's largest and richest city, is also the most bloody place.
Although Sydney has been built for less than 300 years, there have been human activities more than 30, 000 years ago. It was once the most beautiful home for the aborigines. It was also a hell and paradise for exiled prisoners. The mournful murmur of the aborigines, the inscriptions that remained on the corner, seemed to remind us.
In Sydney's history, some emotions never go away, some stories, forever enigmatic.
Hyde Park, with the same name as Britain's famous Hyde Park, is located in the heart of CBD, Sydney. This lush green space is surrounded by famous buildings such as St. Mary's Cathedral, the Australian Library, and the highest court in New South Wales.
Today's Hyde Park, which is usually a white-collar city, is the favorite place for passers-by tourists to relax. On weekends, it is also decorated with free English meetings and community activities, no matter when. Hyde Park is a pleasant corner of the city.
The Hyde Park we see now basically retains the elaborate design of the famous architect Norman Weekes in 1926. However, Hyde Park was built in 1810, in the history of Hyde Park, we have seen at least a few words: "cockpit", "racetrack", "casino", "homeless camp", "rat nest", "market".
How many Sydney people know what Hyde Park has been through? Today, we're going to go underground in Hyde Park, because there's a big secret!
There's a lake beneath Hyde Park that pukes gold.
The lake is known by professionals as St James Lake, you cannot find it in any way on the map because it is now almost hidden and can only be found through a secret passageway by someone with special permission.
St James Lake is in the red area of the picture.
A lot of people might think that this lake is the fountain pool we saw in front of the memorial hall in Hyde Park. That would be a big mistake! The decorative fountain was just a small pool dug out of the ground. And the St James Lake, we are going to talk about today is near this pool, but dozens of meters below the ground, and more than 100 times the size of this pool!
How did this lake come from? And how did you find out? It all starts at the St James train station.
St James Station is right next to Hyde Park. Many of us travel through this railway station countless times a day in CBD, and many times because of the cold and damp that suddenly hit here. Isn't there a little question in our hearts: why the railway station in CBD has almost all been rebuilt? But this railway station is so cold and old that it hasn't changed in 100 years? Is it just to be protected as a historical building?
If you are careful enough, you will find the big secret of the St James railway station: there is a platform that has never been used and closed forever.
In the 1920s, Sydney's government decided to build a new rail line to connect Bondi Beach to the northern beach train line, where St James was a key node and a new platform needed to be opened. As a result, a high-difficulty large-scale project, on the horse.
The tunnel was an extremely difficult project at that time, with few qualified people, and faced with a shortage of talent before the project began. But a sudden discovery changed everything.
Mystery 1: there is gold here
One day, the engineer took a few workers down to the ground to do a geological survey. As they walked through an air-raid shelter, they suddenly found water leaking out of the water. Amazingly, there seemed to be something glowing in the water that looked like scraps of gold.
The engineer quietly returned to the company with some samples, and then asked friends for help in identifying the special impurities in the water, which were indeed gold. This discovery makes engineers very confused, hard to say, next to the land that is about to be opened, hidden in a gold mine!
The engineer reported the discovery to his superiors. The superior decided to dig at once! Whether or not there is a shortage, dig first, if it is really a gold mine, afraid no one to come?
So government ordered the closure of Hyde Park and began digging tunnels.
Hyde Park was now Sydney's most important stronghold for gossip. All of a sudden, it was completely shut down, and many people were angry at first. But then the rumors that there was gold under Hyde Park went away, and the angry crowd burst into an uproar, all of them glaring their eyes and pruning their ears, eager to get into the fence to see what was going on.
Sure enough, it wasn't long before someone dug up a 6-ounce gold nugget! The equivalent of 170g of gold!
There's gold under Hyde Park! The news blew up in Sydney!
All of a sudden, digging a tunnel in St James became a dream job for Sydney men, and thousands of strong men scrambled to be workers digging tunnels. Of course, their real goal was to dig gold. After all, dig a big piece of gold, this life to eat and clothing worry-free.
But in fact, with the exception of the six-ounce gold nugget, no one has ever heard of anyone digging up the gold anymore, possibly because everyone has secretly hidden it, or it is possible that there is no gold mine in it at all. The six-ounce nugget was nothing more than a pie deliberately set by the ruler.
In short, because of the legend of the gold mine, the, St James tunnel is no longer short of hardworking workers.
Although no one knows if there is gold under Hyde Park until now, a strange creature does appear.
Mystery 2: there are water monsters here
With more than half of the tunnel excavation progress, the opened soil is increasingly developing to the depth of Hyde Park. Most of the workers were obsessed with the desire to dig for gold, digging deep land day and night. Until one night there was a strange accident among the night workers, which slowed down the frantic progress of the project.
In fact, we also found that in the process of excavation, it seems that water will always infiltrate from all directions. Although many people are worried about something, but the enthusiasm to dig gold has long been a mystery.
On that evening, several night workers were working as usual. Suddenly a worker standing in the water screamed as if he saw something round his ankle.
It shines silver, like a snake and a fish.
After a while, another worker saw the sudden emergence of the monster out of the water, shining silver, almost like a lightning, it was attacking his feet, it seemed very angry.
Several workers were frightened by this unknown water monster and ran away, but because the construction site was too dark, tripped, fell to the ground!
Who could have guessed that the workers had gone mad and kept repeating the Silver Monster in their mouths.
The news of the construction site spread very quickly, and soon the terrible rumor about the "silver water monster" spread among the workers, who believed that the men were really being attacked by the monster, and that they might be offending the terrible monster. As a result, many people suddenly woke up from the gold mining obsession, leaving the people, and many of the rest are unwilling to work the night shift, because legend has it that the water monster only moves at night.
The fear of "water monsters" directly slowed down the construction of the new St James tunnel, as well as the curiosity of the explorers. Later on, explorers dived deep into the tunnel in search of the legendary silver-glowing monster.
The ultimate mystery, there's a lake hidden here.
The new tunnel project for sacred, St James collapsed before explorers figured out what the monster was.
Some of the tunnels were washed down by sudden flooding, and many thought the monster was angry, which was its punishment for humans.
But engineers and scientists clearly do not believe this superstition. They wondered, from the depth of excavation at the time, obviously far from the aquifer, where the water came from!
To get rid of the monster rumors, these professionals began a survey of the underground Hyde Park around the tunnel, and then came up with an astonishing discovery: there was a great lake hidden beneath Hyde Park ground floor!
Conservatively, the lake is 1km long, 10m wide and at least 6m deep!
it is beyond logic and above reason! How did such a lake come into being?
In any case, this tunnel can not continue digging, because once the lake is dug, the entire St James station could be destroyed! So the engineer hastened to send someone to seal a thick wall on this side of the lake next to the tunnel! The tunnel project came to an end!
There is no way out, it can only be changed, but found no way to avoid this huge mysterious lake. As a result, the, St James line has not been opened and the platform has been shut down and has never been opened.
And all kinds of miraculous legends about this platform are also circulating in the folk.
But in fact, the only truth is that there really is a huge lake beneath Hyde Park, between the ground and the groundwater, in a completely impossible space, a mystery that researchers can't think of!
It's called the St James Lake, real existence, but disappears on the map of the mysterious lake.
Some people believe that this is the abandoned work left by the early years of the excavators digging tunnels, the perennial seepage into a lake; some believe that this is a mysterious military base; More people are willing to believe that this is Hyde Park guarding, that glittering silver water monster's home, sacred inviolability!
Later, in order to understand the origin of the lake and the legend of the water monster, government specially built a passage to St James Lake, and later planned to use the lake to build a huge underground water storage system. In short, knowing the existence of this lake is no longer a mystery, but it is still unknown how the lake actually appeared here!
Of course, a lot of people will wonder if there is a monster in the lake. Scientists believe that the monster should not exist, and that what the workers saw was probably a kind of albino eel that lived here.
The eel looks really scary, and scientists don't understand that they don't exist elsewhere in Sydney. They've been breeding here for almost a hundred years, and no one knows how it happened!
In short, over the years, the sky-dropping lake beneath Hyde Park, and the strange creatures living in the dark lake, have left many researchers unable to explain why they have broken their heads.
Perhaps, as many believe, the lake is blocking the pace of human destruction of Hyde Park, which exists to protect Hyde Park.
When it comes to learning about this, whether or not this park in Sydney's CBD is more cherished and loved, yes, if it had not been for St James Lake to block that huge project, perhaps there would not have been an oasis of the lush city today.