A mountain lake with a village above it

The lake was a mistake in the honourable sense. In the 1970s the villagers of Suoxiyu, who lived in a narrow valley under the stone peaks of the Wulingyuan country, built dams across their gorge to generate electricity — and the water rose into a lake nobody had drawn on any plan. They named it after Baofeng Mountain, which backs it, and Baofeng Lake became one of the calmer pieces of the Wulingyuan Scenic Area: an artificial freshwater reservoir about 2.5 kilometres long and averaging 72 metres deep, hemmed by forested stone peaks on every side. The valley's shape is what makes it read as mountain scenery rather than as infrastructure. The gorge that was dammed was cut between the same quartz sandstone walls that stand as pillars elsewhere in the district, so the lake lies in a corridor of rock with the peaks rising straight off the waterline, and the reflections do the rest. Because it is dammed, its level belongs to management rather than to weather alone; because it is young, its shores carry no ancient temples, only forest. Its water also holds the fog the valley is named for — Suoxiyu in the Tujia language means a village of heavy fog, and on most mornings the peaks above the lake appear and disappear by the hour.

The village came first; the lake is a tenant. Suoxiyu village sits on the south side of the water, and its name — a phrase in Tujia, the language of the region's majority people, meaning a settlement of heavy fog — records what the valley was before the dams: a Tujia mountain village in a gorge, living off its slopes and its stream. The Suoxiyu valley is substantial ground. The nature reserve around it counts more than two thousand peaks, nineteen gullies and six streams, with named sights from the Ten-Mile Gallery to the Yuanyang waterfall, and Huanglong Cave lies in the same section of country. Villages of this kind were reached the way mountain villages always were, on foot up the gorge paths, and later by the roads that tourism brought. Their buildings answered the slopes in the regional manner: the Tujia houses of the Zhangjiajie country were built of timber on the hillsides, with the family's shrine to its ancestors set in the central hall of the house, and one old rule of the chieftain days — that ordinary families might roof with fir bark and thatch but not with tile — lasted into the eighteenth century. When the scenic area's boundary was drawn, the village found itself inside it, its name promoted from local speech to the label of a whole scenic section. The electricity the dams were built to generate was meant for households like these; the lake that resulted now brings a different economy to the same doorsteps.

Baofeng Lake earns its keep quietly now. It is listed among the attractions of Wulingyuan District, inside the same World Heritage package as the pillar forests and the cave, and its surface is its main exhibit: boats cross the water with the peaks reading both above it and in it, and the crossing is the visit. Cameras have used the setting more than once — the lake was a filming location for the television series Journey to the West and for Wulong Mountain Suppression of Bandits — and that screen history matters in a country where a classic serial can keep a location famous for decades. Around the lake, the machinery of the modern park stays modest: the shuttle roads of Wulingyuan serve the district, the cableways and the great lift belong to the pillar valleys, and the monorail along the nearby Ten-Mile Gallery moves visitors through the next valley over. The working life of the valley continues at the edges. The dams still stand and still answer for the water level, the village still sits above its waterline, and the fog that named Suoxiyu still decides which mornings the peaks show themselves and which mornings the lake keeps them. The lake's story is the region's in miniature: an infrastructure project by villagers, half a century old, that a heritage economy adopted as scenery.