Qiandao Lake (千岛湖)

Why Go

Everything Here Used To Be a Hill

1. A landscape with a construction date

Nothing about this view is old. In 1958 this was a river valley in the hills with towns, temples, farmland and roads in it. The Xin’anjiang dam, one of the first large hydroelectric projects China designed and built for itself, closed in 1959, and the water rose until only the hilltops were left. Those hilltops are what a boat now threads between.

You can read the mechanism off the shoreline. The islands are all roughly the same height because they are the top slice of a former hill country, and their edges carry a pale band of bare rock where the water level rises and falls. In one of the pictures below that band is several metres wide. It is a working reservoir, and the level is a decision somebody makes.

2. Two towns are still down there

Hechengz and Shicheng were county seats with walls, gate towers, memorial arches and streets of timber houses, some of the fabric Ming and Qing. They were evacuated and flooded. For forty years they were simply gone, and then in 2001 divers went down and found them: walls standing, carved stone lintels in place, painted timber beams still articulated. The water is cold, still and dark, which is close to ideal for preservation.

The honest part comes next. You cannot go and see them. They lie deep enough to need technical diving, access is controlled, and the handful of permitted descents are not tourism. What exists on shore is a museum and a reconstruction. The towns are a fact about this lake rather than something to put on an itinerary, and knowing they are underneath you changes the boat ride more than any island attraction does.

Orientation

Boats, Bicycles, and Which Ticket

Qiandaohu town on the lake’s eastern side is the base, reached by high-speed rail from Hangzhou in about an hour and from Shanghai in around two and a half. Ferries and tour boats leave from piers in and near the town.

The standard product is a day boat calling at named islands. The alternative is the lakeshore cycle route, which runs for tens of kilometres on good surface with the water beside it, and which most foreign visitors would enjoy more than the island stops. Bicycles are easy to hire in town.

Context

What a Reservoir Costs

The dam was built for power and for flood control on a river that runs down to the Qiantang and out past Hangzhou. It did both, and it did them at a price that was paid by the people who lived in the valley. Published figures put the resettlement in the hundreds of thousands. Most were moved to other parts of Zhejiang and Jiangxi, and the experience of that generation is a large part of what this lake means locally.

Sixty years on, the reservoir has a second job. The water is clean enough that it now supplies drinking water to Hangzhou through a dedicated tunnel, and it is drawn commercially for bottling. That has made water quality a matter of policy: the catchment is regulated, aquaculture has been restricted, and the lake’s economy has been pushed toward tourism and away from fish farming.

The submerged towns have become the other kind of value. They were a loss when they went under and are now a resource, studied by archaeologists and used in the lake’s marketing. Both things can be true. It is worth holding on to the fact that the reason they survived so well is the same reason nobody can go and look at them.

Where to Base

Hangzhou (杭州)

Hangzhou is the gateway and an hour away by high-speed train, which makes this an easy extension rather than an expedition. Qiandaohu town at the lakeside has everything needed and is where you should sleep rather than commuting.

The natural shape is two or three days in Hangzhou for West Lake and the tea hills, then two here, then onward southwest into Jiangxi or south into Anhui. All of it is on fast rail.