The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in the People's Republic of China
14 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in the People's Republic of China are Yamdrok Lake, West Lake and Namtso. The list covers 14 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 14 October 2026.
China's waters span almost every height and climate on Earth. On the Tibetan Plateau, lakes lie at well over four thousand metres, fed by snowmelt and rimmed by bare mountains, and several of them are sacred pilgrimage sites. In the south, soft limestone has been dissolved by monsoon rain into karst towers, gorges and plunging rivers. In between run the Yellow River and the great river systems that carved the country's heartland, and around the cities lie lakes shaped by centuries of poets, gardeners and engineers.
The Tibetan lakes lead here: Yamdrok, a long turquoise lake folded between ridges south of Lhasa; Namtso, a vast saline lake beneath the Nyenchen Tanglha range; and Lake Manasarovar, near Mount Kailash, held sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bon. Far to the north-west, Sayram Lake sits high in the Tian Shan, and Heaven Lake fills the volcanic crater of Changbai Mountain. Near Dunhuang, Crescent Lake is a spring-fed pool that has survived for centuries among towering sand dunes.
In the east, West Lake in Hangzhou is the model of the cultivated landscape, crossed by causeways and lined with pagodas and gardens. The south brings the karst: the Li River winds between limestone peaks from Guilin to Yangshuo, Huangguoshu in Guizhou hides a cave behind its curtain of water, and Ban Gioc–Detian Falls spreads across the border with Vietnam. On the Yellow River, Hukou Waterfall pours thick, ochre water into a narrow gorge.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yamdrok Lake | Lake | |
| 2 | West Lake | Lake | ✓ |
| 3 | Namtso | Lake | |
| 4 | Heaven Lake | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 5 | Karakul Lake | Lake | |
| 6 | Ban Gioc–Detian Falls | Waterfall | |
| 7 | Lake Manasarovar | Lake | |
| 8 | Li River | River | |
| 9 | Huangguoshu Waterfall | Waterfall | |
| 10 | Crescent Lake | Oasis | |
| 11 | Hukou Waterfalls | Waterfall | |
| 12 | Sayram Lake | Lake | |
| 13 | Kanas Lake | Lake | |
| 14 | Baishuitai | Hot spring |
01 Yamdrok Lake
People's Republic of China28.978° N 90.746° E
Bolun Yan bolun · CC0 The lake lies at about 4,440 metres, with an average depth of around 30 metres and a maximum near 60. The colour changes through the day and with the weather, from pale milky blue to a saturated green-blue under a clear sky. Further west along the road, beyond Nangartse, the glaciated massif of Noijin Kangsang, a little over 7,200 metres, rises above the Karo La.
Did you know? According to legend, in 1716 the abbess turned herself and her nuns into sows to scare off a Mongol raid on the monastery.
02 West Lake
People's Republic of China · 3.1 km from Hangzhou30.238° N 120.141° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Vined from Pixabay The lake is as much made as found. It began as a shallow bay of the Qiantang River that silted into a lagoon, and it has survived as open water only because it has been dredged again and again for well over a thousand years.
Did you know? The alternating pattern of one willow and one peach tree along the Su and Bai causeways goes back to Su Shi's 11th-century planting.
03 Namtso
People's Republic of China30.721° N 90.468° E
Image by weiconggao0 from Pixabay The lake's southern horizon is the Nyenchen Tanglha range, whose highest summit rises to 7,162 metres; its snowfields and glaciers fill the view from almost anywhere on the eastern shore, and on still mornings they repeat themselves in the water.
Did you know? Namtso is counted among the three great sacred lakes of Tibet.
04 Heaven Lake
People's Republic of China42.006° N 128.057° E
Gertjerry · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mountain above it, known as Paektu to Koreans and Changbai to the Chinese, is considered a sacred ancestral homeland by both Korean and Manchu tradition, and the lake itself sits almost exactly on the border between China and North Korea — one of the few natural features on Earth genuinely split down the middle by an international line.
Did you know? The centre of the volcano is rising by about 3 millimetres a year as magma accumulates beneath it.
05 Karakul Lake
People's Republic of China38.446° N 75.054° E
Jialiang Gao , www.peace-on-earth.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 The lake lies at about 3,600 metres above sea level, near the meeting point of the Pamir, Tian Shan and Kunlun ranges, in Akto County of the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang. Three giants are visible from its shore — Muztagh Ata, Kongur Tagh and Kongur Tiube (7,530 metres) — and they remain snow-covered throughout the year. Meltwater from the Muztagh Ata glaciers strongly shapes the chemistry of the lake's water and sediments.
Did you know? Kongur Tagh, the highest peak of the Pamirs, is so well screened by neighbouring summits that Europeans did not know of it until 1900.
06 Ban Gioc–Detian Falls
People's Republic of China22.856° N 106.722° E
jankgo · CC BY 2.0 The border itself took a long and difficult path to where it sits today. During the brief but bloody Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979, the falls area became a crossing point for Chinese forces, and the frontier here remained unresolved for another two decades afterward — it was only formally settled in 1999, more than 20 years after the fighting.
Did you know? Boundary marker No. 53, a stone set up during French–Qing demarcation in the 1890s and inscribed in French and Chinese, stands above the falls.
07 Lake Manasarovar
People's Republic of China30.667° N 81.500° E
Jean-Marie Hullot · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few lakes are held sacred by so many faiths at once. The Sanskrit name joins the words for "mind" and "lake": in the Ramayana, Brahma is said to have created it from his own thought. Hindus regard nearby Kailash as the dwelling of Shiva.
Did you know? For the Khas people of Nepal's Humla district, a ritual bath in the lake is an essential step for shamans acquiring their powers.
08 Li River
People's Republic of China · 36.2 km from Guilin25.561° N 110.465° E
Image by matressa_ from Pixabay Geologists call this tower karst. It formed from thick beds of Devonian and Carboniferous limestone, dissolved by the monsoon rains into a forest of steep-sided peaks separated by level ground, with caves such as Reed Flute Cave hollowed inside them. In 2014 the Guilin karst was added to the South China Karst World Heritage site.
Did you know? Below Pingle the Li continues as the Gui River, and together they run about 439 kilometres to join the West River, part of the Pearl River system.
09 Huangguoshu Waterfall
People's Republic of China · 39 km from Anshun25.992° N 105.666° E
Kcx36 · CC BY-SA 4.0 What sets Huangguoshu apart is that you can walk behind it. The Water Curtain Cave, a natural gallery about 134 metres long cut into the cliff some 40 to 47 metres up the face of the fall, runs right behind the falling water, with openings like windows through which the river thunders past close enough to feel. From below, a path leads to the pool at the base, where on sunny days rainbows hang in the spray.
Did you know? The pool at its foot is called Rhinoceros Pool, said to be named for its shape.
10 Crescent Lake
People's Republic of China · 6.3 km from Dunhuang40.087° N 94.669° E
Image by nhluoj from Pixabay No river feeds it. The lake survives on groundwater connected to a subterranean channel linked to the Dang River, whose ultimate source is glacier meltwater from the Qilian Mountains, far to the south — meaning a spring sitting in the middle of the Gobi's dune sea is, at the end of a long underground chain, fed by mountain ice.
Did you know? The temple-like pavilions on its bank are modern: the Tinglei Pavilion was built in 1992 and the Yuquan Pavilion in 1997.
11 Hukou Waterfalls
People's Republic of China36.147° N 110.444° E
Leruswing · CC BY-SA 3.0 The fall sits where the middle Yellow River cuts through the Jinxia Grand Canyon, on the boundary between Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces; one bank belongs to Ji County, the other to Yichuan County. The main channel is usually about 30 metres wide and swells to around 50 metres in flood season, when the river spreads over the surrounding rock shelves and the whole bed seems to boil.
Did you know? The image behind the name is ancient: early Chinese geographical writing likened the swirling river here to water poured out of a pot.
12 Sayram Lake
People's Republic of China44.598° N 81.165° E
lwtt93 from Shanghai, China · CC BY 2.0 The lake lay on the northern branch of the Silk Road, and travellers have written about it for eight centuries. The Taoist master Qiu Chuji, crossing to Central Asia to meet Genghis Khan, described a lake two hundred li across, surrounded by snowy summits, and called it a heavenly pool; the Mongol statesman Yelü Chucai and, centuries later, the Qing official Lin Zexu, exiled to Xinjiang after the First Opium War, also left accounts of it.
Did you know? Of the 32 streams that flow into the lake, only seven run all year round.
13 Kanas Lake
People's Republic of China48.815° N 87.040° E
Newbamboo · CC BY-SA 4.0 The best way to grasp its scale is from the Guanyu Pavilion, the "fish-watching" lookout perched more than 600 metres above the water, reached by a long stairway of over a thousand steps. From there the lake winds away between ridges with snow peaks at its head.
Did you know? Besides taimen, the cold water holds Siberian species such as burbot, Arctic grayling and lenok, a reminder that this basin belongs to the Arctic watershed.
14 Baishuitai
People's Republic of China27.502° N 100.032° E
Chensiyuan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The terraces lie on the northern flank of Haba Snow Mountain, near the upper valley of the Yangtze, at an altitude of roughly 2,400 metres. They are built by chemistry rather than by hand.
Did you know? A rock on the northern side of the terraces bears an engraved old poem praising their silver steps and crystal springs.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful water wonders in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Yamdrok Lake ranks first, followed by West Lake and Namtso.
- Why is the Hukou Waterfall yellow?
- The Yellow River carries an enormous load of fine loess silt eroded from the Loess Plateau, which colours the water at Hukou Waterfall a muddy ochre.
- Is West Lake a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
- Yes. The West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2011 for the way its causeways, islands, temples and gardens shaped the ideal of landscape design in China and beyond.
- Why is Lake Manasarovar sacred?
- Lake Manasarovar lies near Mount Kailash and is revered in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and the Bon religion; pilgrims bathe in it and walk around it as part of the Kailash pilgrimage.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 14 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.