Red Seabeach
Interesting facts
- The crimson comes from betalain, a pigment the seepweed builds up in autumn as rainfall and tides leave the flats saltier and cooler.
- Satellite images from 1986 to 2022 show the area covered by seepweed shrinking by roughly a quarter as ports and fish farms replaced tidal flats.
- Researchers found that boardwalks and crowds frighten away the waterbirds that eat crabs, so more crabs survive to graze on the seepweed.
- Extra sediment carried down after dams and bridges were built upstream has made it harder for new seepweed seedlings to take root.
- In 1958 engineers blocked the Liao's eastern branch, sending the whole river into the Shuangtaizi, which was officially renamed the Liao River in 2011.
- The rare Saunders's gull that nests here is only about 33 cm long; among gulls, only the little gull is smaller.
- Saunders's gulls depend on seepweed saltmarsh for breeding, laying two or three eggs in a simple scrape in May.
- In autumn satellite images the estuary shows three colours: red seepweed flats, green Phragmites reed beds along the river and yellow rice fields.
Why it is worth it
Every autumn a stretch of coast on the Bohai Sea in northeast China turns crimson. The colour comes not from sand or rock but from Suaeda salsa, a small seepweed that is one of the few plants able to live on these salty, alkaline tidal flats. It sprouts in spring a pale red, deepens through the summer, and by September and October covers the mudflats in solid red, threaded by tidal creeks and edged by shallow sea and reed beds.
The Red Beach lies in Dawa County, near the city of Panjin in Liaoning Province, at the innermost corner of Liaodong Bay. Here the Liao River and its branches, the Shuangtaizi and the Xiaoling, have built a great delta of mudflats, shallow sea and marsh. Around the red flats grows one of the largest reed marshes in the world, often described as the largest in Asia; the reeds have long been cut to make paper. During the Cultural Revolution part of the marsh was turned into grain fields, and from the early 1980s oil extraction took priority in the area. As the oil reserves dwindled, the authorities turned to restoring the wetland, with French development cooperation from 2013.
The Shuangtaizi River estuary was made a national-level nature reserve in 1988, and in 2004 the wetland was listed under the Ramsar Convention as a site of international importance. More than 260 species of birds have been recorded. The marshes and mudflats are a resting and breeding place for birds migrating between Russia and Mongolia and warmer lands in Southeast Asia and Oceania. The red-crowned crane breeds here, and the area is one of the main nesting grounds of the rare Saunders's gull; Siberian cranes and Oriental storks also pass through. In 2019 the Red Beach scenic area was given China's highest tourism grade, 5A.
Getting there
The Red Beach lies in Dawa County, about 32 km from the city of Panjin. The nearest airport is Jinzhou Bay Airport (JNZ), about 46 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Red Beach, located in Dawa County, Panjin, Liaoning, China, is famous for its landscape featuring the red plant of Suaeda salsa of the family Chenopodiaceae. It is based in the biggest wetland and reed marsh in the world. The landscape is composed of shallow seas and tide-lands.
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