The sandbar in the middle of the river

Walk the island from end to end and the map explains itself: a spine of sand five kilometres long and, at most points, between forty and a hundred and forty metres across, so the river is always within earshot on both sides. Chinese records first notice it in AD 305, in the Yongxing reign of Emperor Hui of the Jin dynasty, and credit its birth to the ordinary work of a river: rapids dropping sand and gravel that the current could not carry away. It grew into the largest of the many alluvial bars of the Xiang's lower reaches, large enough for the nickname China's First Continent, and large enough to farm. In the Tang dynasty the island's groves shipped oranges to the Jianghan region, and poets had noticed it by then too: Du Fu named it in a poem about visiting the temples on opposite banks, and one of the classic Eight Views of Xiaoxiang — river and sky under sunset snow — was set here. For most of its life the isle was working land, orchard and garden divided among households, and the old gazetteers even counted it as three islands that joined at low water, a shape the accumulating silt has long since closed.

The southern tip is where the poem stands. In 1925 Mao Zedong, then a young man living in Changsha, came to the isle head and wrote 'Qinyuanchun: Changsha', and its famous question — asking the vast and misty land who masters its rise and fall — turned a beauty spot into a national image that schoolchildren still recite. Swimming gave the place its hold on him. As a student in the city he swam the Xiang here with friends who became famous revolutionaries themselves: He Shuheng, Cai Hesen, Xiang Jingyu, and the brothers Xiao Zisheng and Xiao San. After 1949 he returned to swim near the isle head seven times, and in October 1974, at eighty-one, he came back to Changsha and stood once more at the tip in recollection. The island had earlier admirers as well: the philosophers Zhu Xi and Zhang Shi, crossing between lecture halls in the twelfth century, are recorded rounding this same point of sand on their journeys up and down the Xiang. In 1982 the city opened the isle-head park, setting Mao's handwritten title and the whole lyric into one stele among pavilions and ordered rows of orange trees, so the view that prompted the question is now framed by the answer the city prefers to remember.

The island is now a park with a station. A youth sculpture of Mao Zedong was raised here on 20 December 2009 and anchors the lawns; since 2010 the Orange Isle music festival has put stages on the sand in most years. Changsha Metro's Line 2 reached the island in 2014, and a small sightseeing train circles the isle daily from seven in the morning, so the crowd arrives without a boat. Access is managed like a stadium's: the park closes to visitors between ten at night and seven in the morning on weekends and holidays, a quiet admission of how many people a long narrow island can hold. The state's verdicts on the place have swung too. In August 2016 the national tourism authority stripped the isle of its top 5A scenic rating, citing safety hazards, dirty grounds and degraded services; after a formal expert review the rating was restored in December 2017. Older layers persist at the edges: the river-god temple and the Gongji tower, destroyed by Taiping cannon fire in the 1850s, were rebuilt in 2010, and a handful of the foreign consulate and merchants' houses that stood here after 1911 still keep their ground among the trees.