Heaven Lake
Interesting facts
- Under secret Sino-Korean treaties of 1962 and 1964, North Korea received 54.5 percent of the lake's surface and nine of the sixteen surrounding peaks.
- The lake averages about 213 metres deep and holds roughly two cubic kilometres of water, making it one of the deepest crater lakes in Asia.
- Water leaves the lake northward and drops over a waterfall about 70 metres high near the outlet, the head of the Erdaobai River.
- The volcanic massif around the lake is the source of three major rivers: the Songhua, the Tumen and the Yalu.
- The centre of the volcano is rising by about 3 millimetres a year as magma accumulates beneath it.
- In September 2018 the leaders of North and South Korea, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, visited the lake together during an inter-Korean summit.
- The lake is fed almost entirely by rain and snow, with no significant river flowing into the caldera.
- Heaven Lake gave its name to a song on The Mountain Goats' 2008 album Heretic Pride and appears in the 2023 film The Breaking Ice.
Why it is worth it
Heaven Lake fills the caldera left by the so-called Millennium Eruption of 946, one of the most violent volcanic events anywhere on Earth in the last five thousand years, which blasted out somewhere between 100 and 120 cubic kilometres of ash and rock. What's left is the highest and largest crater lake in Northeast Asia: a sheet of water sitting at 2,189 metres, plunging to nearly 400 metres in places, ringed by sixteen peaks that all clear 2,500 metres. For roughly eight months of the year, from mid-October to mid-June, it's locked under ice.
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.
Since at least 1903, when a buffalo-like animal was said to have attacked three people before diving back under the surface after being shot at, locals and visitors have reported a creature living in the depths — a Tianchi "monster" variously described as seal-like, plesiosaur-like, or simply a long grey neck breaking the water. A 1962 sighting through a telescope drew more than a hundred corroborating witnesses, and a 2007 video appeared to show several finned shapes moving together near the North Korean shore. Geologists remain openly skeptical that anything could survive in a lake with this volcanic a history, but the story has outlived every debunking.
Best time to visit
June through mid-October, when the lake is free of ice.
Getting there
31 km from Samjiyŏn-ŭp. Changbaishan Airport (NBS) is about 38 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Heaven Lake is a volcanic crater lake atop Paektu Mountain. It lies on the border between China and North Korea, and is roughly evenly divided between the two countries.
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