The sandbar in the middle of the river
Orange Isle is a five-kilometre sandbar in the Xiang at Changsha. How the island formed, the poem written at its tip and the park it became are three turns in the long working life of a single river sandbar.
Orange Isle
Orange Isle (橘子洲) is a narrow sandbar island in the centre of the Xiang River at Changsha, five kilometres long, with the old city on its east bank and Yuelu Mountain on its west. Formed by river silt in the fourth century, it was recorded by Jin-dynasty chroniclers and later planted with the orange groves that gave it its name. Mao Zedong wrote his most famous early poem at its southern tip in 1925, and the isle now carries his youth sculpture, a park and a metro station. A few of the foreign consulate and traders' houses that stood here in the early twentieth century survive among the trees.
Orange Isle