Kunming Lake
| Kunming Lake | |
|---|---|
Kunming Lake
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| Location | Summer Palace, Beijing |
| Coordinates | Coordinates: 39°59′30″N 116°16′20″E / 39.99167°N 116.27222°E |
| Type | artificial lake |
| Basin countries | China |
| Surface area | 2.2 km2 (0.85 sq mi) |
| Average depth | 1.5 m (4.9 ft) |
| Max. depth | 3 m (9.8 ft) |
Kunming Lake (Chinese: , p Kūnmíng Hú) is the central lake on the grounds of the Summer Palace in Beijing, China. Together with the Longevity Hill, Kunming Lake forms the key landscape features of the Summer Palace gardens.
With an area of 2.2 square kilometres (0.8 sq mi), Kunming Lake covers approximately three quarters of the Summer Palace grounds. It is quite shallow, with an average depth of only 1.5 metres (5 ft).
Kunming Lake is a man-made lake. Its predecessors were called Wengshan (Jar Hill) Pond and Xihu Lake. They were reservoirs which had been used as sources of water both for the city and irrigation of fields over a period of 3,500 years. Guo Shoujing, a famous astronomer and engineer in his time, developed it into a reservoir for the capital of the Yuan Dynasty in 1291. The conversion of the area into an imperial garden was commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor with the work being carried out between 1750 and 1764. In the course of creating the gardens, the lake area was extended by a workforce of almost 10,000 laborers.
In the year 1990 and 1991, the Beijing Municipal Government undertook the first dredging of the lake in 240 years. A total of 652,600 cubic metres (853,600 cu yd) of sludge were removed in the work. 205 Japanese bombs dropped during the Sino-Japanese War were also found.
Kunming Lake is designed to represent the traditional Chinese gardening practice of "one pond, three hills" (). Like the islands in Hangzhou's West Lake and the Forbidden City's Taiye Lake, they were intended to represent three islands of the immortals mentioned in the Classic of Mountains and Seas: Penglai, Yingzhou, and Fangzhang. Kunming's three are named "South Lake Island" (t 南湖島, s 南湖岛, Nánhúdǎo), "Round Fort Island" (t 團城島, s 团城岛, Tuánchéngdǎo), and "Algæ-view Hall Island" (t 藻鑒堂島, s 藻鉴堂岛, Zǎojiàntángdǎo)
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