A city built around a lake

Changde's setting is usually summed up as three mountains and three rivers: Taiyang Mountain to the north, Mount De to the south and Mount Hefu to the west, with the Yuan River and its neighbours crossing the plain between them. The city once had many lakes, ponds and streams, and growth has diverted or buried a good number of them. Liuye (柳叶湖) — the name means willow leaf — is the exception: a freshwater lake of about 17.6 square kilometres in the Yangtze basin, lying to the northeast of the city centre, large enough to count as the area's other major geographic feature after the river itself. Two smaller streams, the Chuanzi and the Xin, also cross the urban district, so the lake sits inside a working water system rather than standing alone as scenery. For a prefecture of more than five million people, keeping a body of open water this size on the edge of the downtown is a choice, not an accident of geography. What has grown around it is not industry but public ground — the parks and resort zone that now administer the water's edge — and that choice defines how the city reads its own centre.

Changde is an old river town that has kept doubling its water frontage. Historically it sat on the Yuan's north bank; development has long since spread to the south, and today Wuling District on the left bank faces Dingcheng across the water, holding between them the administrative heart of the municipality. In the past decade the city has been rebuilt at speed — new high-rises, rebuilt roads, new schools, parks and museums — and rather than crowding its large lake under, Changde drew an administrative line around it: the Liuye Lake Tourism Resort is one of the municipality's designated special management zones, a wrapper that puts the lake and its shore under one planning authority. The gesture is pointed in a city where numerous lakes, ponds and streams have already been diverted or buried. Water is also where the city keeps its record of itself. The Changde Poetry Wall runs three kilometres along the downtown riverfront, engraved with poems mostly from ancient China, listed by Guinness as the longest wall of engraved arts in the world — and functioning, every flood season, as the city's flood wall. A city that engraves its poetry on its flood defences has said something about what its waterfront is for.

Liuye Lake now carries a national tourism rating and, more importantly, the city's daily leisure. Its facilities were built to competition standard: the lake hosted the eighth Asian Rowing Championship and stages local, national and international sporting events, while remaining the recreation area Changde people actually use. Visitor itineraries put it first among the in-town sights, ahead of Taiyang Mountain, the Poetry Wall and the pedestrian street. The lake also does municipal work that has nothing to do with weekends. Changde's greatest recurring danger is flooding — floods arrive roughly every two years, major floods about once every four — and a large, absorbent body of open water beside the built-up area is infrastructure as much as scenery. The city has fitted an urban waterlogging early-warning system, a network of sensors feeding predictive models, as part of its sponge-city works, and Liuye is the largest single sheet of water in that logic: a place where heavy rain can gather and be held. On an ordinary evening the same shore does duty as the city's front room, the one large open horizon inside the built-up area. The lake gives Changde its identity as a city arranged around water rather than merely placed beside it.