More Chill, Please: Dianchi Lake in Kunming

Dianchi, also known in ancient times as Diannan Ze, Kunming Lake, or Kunchi, is the sixth largest freshwater lake in China and the largest in Yunnan Province. Its total area reaches about 330 square kilometers, roughly the size of fifty West Lakes put together. Yet for all that breadth, it is not deep. The average depth is only around five meters, and the deepest point is just about eleven.

The lake was formed mainly by water collecting in a subsided basin along an earthquake fault. Another fact about Dianchi Lake is almost unsettling in its consistency: its surface area has been shrinking for centuries. In the Tang and Song periods it covered around 510 square kilometers. By the Yuan Dynasty it had fallen to about 410. In the Ming Dynasty it was roughly 350, and by the Qing Dynasty and into modern times the lake’s capacity kept dropping sharply.

In 1969, one hundred thousand soldiers and civilians in the Kunming area gathered at the well known Dongfeng Square and launched a massive land reclamation campaign around the lake. The slogans were to move mountains and fill the lake, to fight against heaven and earth. Looking back, the stamp of that era can feel like a bitter joke. The project lasted three full years and directly reduced Dianchi’s area by 35,000 Mu. Wetland ecosystems around the lake were severely damaged, and Dianchi’s natural self purification ability was badly weakened. Add industrial wastewater and domestic sewage discharged along the upstream riverbanks, and by the 1990s the so called “Plateau Pearl” had become little more than a stinking ditch. By 2000, Dianchi Lake’s water quality had already fallen to worse than Grade V, nearly losing any function as water at all, with outbreaks of blue green algae and water hyacinth spreading everywhere.

In 2021, Kunming began implementing the Measures for the Construction and Management of Dianchi’s Ecological Wetlands, making it clear that wetland construction and management around the lake should follow principles of scientific restoration, protection first, and sustainable development. Even now, you can still spot cleanup boats at the Panlong River inflow, collecting and clearing out blue green algae. The effort has shown early results, but compared with other waters in Yunnan, such as Fuxian Lake, Dianchi’s water quality is still much worse. To the naked eye it looks about the same as West Lake, though West Lake may be just a little better.

And yet Dianchi Lake Kunming keeps its pull. Otherwise it would not draw so many Siberian black headed gulls to winter here. Their sheets of white, wheeling over the water, have become the softest kind of poetry in Kunming’s cold season. A touch of morning light, a thread of sunset, bald cypress rising from the wetlands, and that cobalt blue unique to the plateau. Clean, restrained, a little aloof, and free.