An island of tea and bamboo

Out in Dongting Lake, west of Yueyang, an oval island covers less than one square kilometre — 0.96 exactly — yet tradition gives it seventy-two peaks, the highest a modest 63.5 metres. This is Junshan (君山岛), once called Mount Xiang, then Mount Dongting, a former Daoist retreat that now belongs to the Yueyang Tower and Dongting Lake national scenic area. Poets fixed its image early: Liu Yuxi of the Tang dynasty compared the green island in the vast water to a green snail in a silver plate, and the comparison has never been bettered. The island's name comes from the goddesses of the Xiang River, the two consorts of the sage-king Shun, who searched for his body and mourned on these slopes; in Qu Yuan's 'Nine Songs' the pair buried here are invoked as the Xiang Lord and the Xiang Lady, and the hill took its present name, Lord Mountain, from them. Bamboo is the island's signature plant — spotted, square and twin-trunked forms are counted among its rarities — and tea grows on the same ground. The lake does the framing: water on every side, and the tower of Yueyang visible across it.

The island's buildings have served the dead and the immortals rather than the living. Across the dynasties, records count thirty-six pavilions and forty-eight temples on its small area, and the sites that remain are mostly shrines. The tomb of the two consorts, a mound said to hold Ehuang and Nüying, stands at the centre of the legend: they followed the emperor Shun on his southern tour, were stopped by storms, and when word of his sudden death reached them they wept until their tears marked the local bamboo with spots that never wash out, then died of grief. A Qing imperial commissioner paid for the tomb's great repair in 1881 and raised its stone, carved 'Tomb of the Two Consorts of Emperor Yu'. Another loved site is Liu Yi's Well, named for the hero of a Tang dynasty tale, a scholar who carried a letter for the Dragon King's mistreated daughter down to her underwater palace and eventually married her; the well is pointed out as his entrance, with a pavilion beside it. A third remembers the Daoist immortal Lü Dongbin, said to have chanted over the lake view here. And the island's most famous crop fits the shrine economy: Junshan Silver Needle tea was listed as a tribute to the imperial family as early as the Tang dynasty.

Junshan is now a national 5A scenic area — the top grade in China's tourism system — and it carries a second name, Love Island, in memory of its grieving consorts. The visitor trail strings the surviving sites together: the tomb and ancestral temple of the two consorts, Liu Yi's Well with its pavilion, the Feilai bell, the Garden of Love and the Xiaoyao Palace, scattered among the seventy-two peaks. Tea is still the island's living industry. Junshan Yinzhen is counted among China's ten most famous teas; the buds are grown on these slopes, and the protected hills around still carry the rare bamboos — spotted, square and twin-trunked — that made the place a garden before it was a park. The island is run together with Yueyang Tower as one scenic area, a combination that recorded more than three million visits in 2010. Brewed in a glass, the Silver Needle leaves are said to stand upright like small swords before they settle, a piece of theatre that belongs to the island as much as the tomb does. Seen from the water, the low green profile explains the old comparisons: a green snail floating where four rivers end and the Yangtze system begins.