Lop Lake

The Lop Lake, reputed as the "lake of death" and located to the northeast of Rouqiang County in Xinjiang , attracts historians and geographers from home and abroad by its mystery.

The Lop Lake, also called Lop Nur, was named Youze in the Classic of Mountains and Seas(Shan Hai Jing in Chinese), a famous Chinese geographical book written in the pre-Qin (221-206BC) years. The Lop Lake is the Mongolian transliteration, which means a lake where waters gather.

The History of the Han Dynasty(Han Shu in Chinese) mentions that the lake covered a large area of 300 square lis (1 li equals 500 meters), with the water level never rising in summer or dropping in winter.

As shown in pictures taken by satellites, the Lop Lake today is just a desolate land with rings and rings of salt shells, surrounded by salt marshes and a salt-encrusted plain.

But according to some historical documents, the Lop Lake was once a huge lake in the northeast of the Western Regions, where six or seven rivers gathered, such as the Tarim River, the Peacock River, and the Milan River. The lake once covered an area of 2,400-3,000 square kilometers, making it the second largest inland lake in China, with all the nearby rivers streaming into it.

Just west of the Lop Lake once stood the important caravan trading city of Loulan, also an ancient garrison town built to guard China's western frontier and the Silk Roadtraffic that passed through it.

In 126, after his trip to the Western Regions, Zhangqian (a Chinese explorer of the Silk Road in the Han Dynasty(206BC-220)) reported to the emperor that the Kingdom of Loulan had city walls around its capital and was near a salt lake. Before long, the booming Loulan Kingdom disappeared without any notice. When Marco Polopassed by in 1224, it had been buried in the sands for over a thousand years.

The vast Lop Lake turned into a totally dry salt marsh in 1972 because the lower reaches of the Tarim River, the only water source at the time for the lake, gradually dried up in the 1960s.

Many explorers from all over the world have investigated the lake and left their brilliant descriptions about it, some even giving their life to the so-named "triangle of the devil," making it even more mysterious.