Visitor numbers are up in China’s rural northwest, despite off-putting precautions
Lake Kanas, in China’s Xinjiang province, is about as far as it gets from the overlapping exurbs of the country’s east coast mega-cities. The sapphire waters flowing through pine forests, past mountains still capped with snow in June, are more reminiscent of British Columbia. And like that part of the Pacific Northwest, home to a third of all Bigfoot sightings, Kanas is well known to cryptozoologists. It’s thought to be home to lake monsters — a Chinese Loch Ness.
In the local language, Tuvan, these monsters are called Hobzhk, which means “changing” or “strange”. Tuvan lore says they plug up the bottom of the 189-metre-deep lake, preventing it from draining out. Genghis Khan thought them lucky, assigning 126 soldiers to protect them. In 2007, the requisite grainy video footage to support the myth aired on Xinjiang TV, showing huge black creatures breaking the lake’s surface.
According to Xiao Yue, a 20-year-old tour guide who grew up a few hundred kilometres from Lake Kanas, “technically, they’re huge fish that love to eat meat. Their scientific name is Hucho Taimen.”
The biggest Hucho Taimen seen elsewhere is about 2 metres long, but Xiao Yue says fish exceeding 12 metres in length have been caught on camera in Kanas.
On summer days, when temperatures approach 30 degrees celsius, she begs sceptical visitors not to enter the lake for a refreshing dip, adamant that the Hucho Taimen, or Siberian salmon, have a taste for human flesh.
“Farmers haven taken their cows, sheep and horses to the edge of the lake, and they’ve suddenly vanished, she says. “Later they’ve found their bones on the shore.”
For all Xiao Yue’s concern, the lake monsters aren‘t a real threat in Kanas. Swimming is prohibited in the lake, but that has more to do with concealed rocks and a swift current where the lake drains south past Sleeping Dragon Bay. Despite the monster’s reputation as a man eater, it’s the one on the menu in the Kanas Mountain Villa hotel.
The more apparent anxiety here is civil unrest.
Metal detectors are ubiquitous, as are door guards with helmets and protective vests. Crude wooden bats meant for visitors to use in self defence lean against the walls of accommodations, alongside laminated diagrams showing how they can be used to disarm knife-wielding attackers.
Kanas itself hasn’t experienced significant violence, and Xiao Yue is adamant the area — giant fish aside — is safe. A middle-aged woman in a tribal print head band, an employee at the Fox Bookstore, told me she didn’t wear her stab proof “POLICE” vest to protect herself. It was just to make visitors feel more secure, knowing that she could protect us.
Of course, the precautions have the opposite effect, making you think there is a genuine threat — from the police if no-one else. Tourists in Kanas are stopped if caught taking photos or video of the police and made to delete the images from their devices.
The heightened security comes courtesy of Chen Quanguo, the new party chief of Xinjiang, a position he acquired as a reward for his tough handling of Tibet. He has invested heavily in security in Xinjiang, constructing a network of prefabricated convenience store-like cop shops all over Xinjiang.
Violence has been a problem in parts of the province in recent years. In 2014, tourism in Kanas plummeted after blasts in Luntai County killed 50, part of ongoing tensions between the ethnic Han majority and the Uighur muslim minority. That the riots took place in the south, far from Kanas — where most locals are ethnic Kazakhs and Tuvans, not Uighurs — meant little to domestic tourists instructed in Xinjiang’s ‘dangers’ by state press.
By 2015, however, tourism had recovered. Ticket sales entering the Kanas Scenic Area rose six percent to over 400,000 visitors. And in June this year, still part of the slack season in Kanas, hotels were already full. An 100km ultra-marathon trail race and an x-games style snowboard competition have recently been established, catering to a more intrepid breed of Chinese tourist willing to explore one of the most beautiful, least touched parts of China.
As tourism takes off, local Kazakhs and Tuvans have found jobs as rafting guides, dancers, throat-singers and “model families”, cooking barbecued lamb kebabs, air-dried sour cheese rocks and hand-grabbed-rice and serving it in their homes. They’re also being recruited into security jobs that many seem quite ambivalent about. Nomadic peoples here never had much use for fences, simply tying three hooves loosely together to prevent their horses from bolting.
With the monsters confined to the lake and the tourists fenced into their log cabin complexes, much of Kanas remains wild and free. The security measures are annoying but surmountable, with plenty of landscape left to explore off the passport-controlled, X-rayed track.
As to the security threat, Xiao Yue — who’s neither Han Chinese nor Uighur but Hui — puts it best. “There’s a stereotype about Xinjiang, not just Uighurs, that they did some things they’re not supposed to, so Xinjiang is no good. But us Xinjiang people are great, we’re really warm and friendly. You haven’t felt unsafe, right?”
An edited version of this story appeared in The Guardian
