Sayram Lake
Interesting facts
- Sayram is nicknamed "the last tear of the Atlantic", because it marks the farthest point reached by moist Atlantic air carried east on the westerlies.
- The lake fills a graben, a block of crust that sank between faults as the Tian Shan was folded and uplifted.
- It reaches about 110 metres at its deepest, averages around 56 metres, and holds some 26 billion cubic metres of water.
- Its water is slightly brackish, of the sulphate type, with a salinity of about 2.85 grams per litre and a pH of around 8.8.
- Of the 32 streams that flow into the lake, only seven run all year round.
- From December the lake freezes over, with ice reaching one to two metres thick, and it does not thaw until May.
- The name Santai Haizi comes from Santai, a Qing-dynasty post station that stood on the lake's eastern shore.
- Botanists have recorded about 639 species of seed plants around the lake, from 288 genera and 58 families.
- Before the 1990s introductions succeeded, attempts to stock the lake with cold-water fish had been going on since 1976 with little result.
- Since 2007 an annual cycling race has been held on the road that circles the lake.
Why it is worth it
High in the northern Tian Shan, less than fifty kilometres from the Kazakh border, a vast blue lake lies in a basin of grassland ringed by snow peaks. Sayram Lake, in the Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang, is the largest and the highest alpine lake in the region: it covers about 458 square kilometres at an altitude of around 2,070 metres. It has no outlet. Glacial meltwater, rain and snow carried in by the westerlies, runoff from the surrounding ranges and springs keep it full, and its old Chinese names include Santai Haizi and the "Clean Sea".
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 Yelรผ Chucai and, centuries later, the Qing official Lin Zexu, exiled to Xinjiang after the First Opium War, also left accounts of it. The mountains themselves were thinly inhabited, but the valleys to the east were home in turn to Saka nomads, the Wusun, the Gรถktรผrks and the Oirat Mongols, and rock art, tombs, ovoo cairns, steles and the remains of temples and post stations survive around the shore. A Kazakh folk tale tells of two young lovers parted by a demon, who threw themselves into an abyss to be together; their tears filled it and became the lake.
The lake was born of glacial cirques and originally held no fish at all. Since the 1990s some sixteen species, among them peled and Arctic cisco, have been introduced and have settled. On the shores, steppe animals such as the corsac fox and the bobak marmot live alongside whooper swans, mallards and other waterbirds of the lakeside wetlands. A road about 79 kilometres long circles the whole lake.
Getting there
The G30 expressway from รrรผmqi to Khorgas passes the lake and then descends to Huocheng and the Ili valley through the Guozigou gorge, crossed by a high cable-stayed bridge. The town of Huocheng lies about 65 km away in a straight line. Yining Airport (YIN) is about 73 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Sairam Lake, also known as Santai Haizi or historically the "Clean Sea" (ๅๆตท), is an endorheic freshwater lake in the northern Tianshan Mountains at Bรถrtala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang, China, less than 50ย km (31ย mi) from the border with Kazakhstan. The name Sayram originally derives from Kazakh, meaning "blessing".
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