Mr Viral
YUNNAN, Southwest China — The bottom of Fuxian Lake feels like a world stripped bare. Thick with silt, still and silent as stone, the slightest movement sends clouds of sediment swirling.
In the dark, silent waters, glimpses emerge — half-buried fishing nets, faint tracks in the lakebed, swaying forests of waterweeds, and, if you’re lucky, the vague outline of a large fish before it vanishes into the depths.
But for all this silence and silt, stories of this cold, murky lake perched nearly 2,000 meters above sea level in southwestern China, are louder in legend.
Tales of stone formations arranged like streets, patterns carved into rocks, and relics pulled from the mud. A government-backed expedition even discovered what looked like an ancient submerged city scattered across the lakebed. The findings sparked a frenzy of speculation: Was this Yuyuan, a legendary city swallowed by an earthquake nearly two millennia ago?
Much of it remains unproven. Yet compelling enough to keep people coming back.
Ask Kris Ariel. For 16 years, he’s made the 70-kilometer trip from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, to explore Fuxian’s depths. Highly experienced, Kris holds a professional diving qualification of open water scuba instructor.
“It’s cold, visibility is low, and the bottom is mud,” says Kris, almost apologetically, adding, “There’s not much to see. The most exciting thing is a sunken fishing boat — if we can find it.”
Known in Kunming as Xiao (“Little”) Kris, he’s part of a small but tight-knit community of divers who keep coming back to Fuxian. Many are veterans with years of underwater experience. Others are just getting into diving.
Most come for the technical challenges that Fuxian offers — the unique buoyancy of freshwater, the silt-heavy depths, and the low visibility that tests their navigation skills. Others chase something less tangible: With several mainstream diving spots now overcrowded, Fuxian offers solitude, and the fleeting sense of discovery.
For those who plunge its depths often, or stay long enough, Fuxian’s secrets slowly begin to take shape — if one knows where to look.
Sixth Tone went down to see.
The deep
Beneath the lake’s surface, the only measure of descent is the speed of dark.
Above, the lake shimmered a crisp, cobalt blue; below, light collapses into a wall of dense green. The temperature, despite repeated warnings from fellow divers of icy cold, feels more refreshing than biting.
The descent is easy — freshwater offers little buoyancy. At the bottom is a flat expanse of mud, heavy and still. Visibility shrinks to no more than three meters, torches cutting thin lines in the thick water.
There’s no current, no movement. The silence is almost stifling, broken only by the rasp of breath through the regulator and streams of bubbles drifting to the surface.
Kris’s light flickers briefly across the mud, catching faint traces etched into the lakebed — lines crisscrossing in shapes so precise they almost seem man-made. But a closer look shows that they are made by snails, the largest the size of a golf ball, carving thin trails as they inch slowly across the silt.
In the hazy light, it’s easy to see snail’s tracks as something else — patterns that resemble cobblestones, faint impressions of streets long forgotten. Especially here, in Fuxian Lake, where myth runs deep.
Legends tell of Yuyuan, an ancient city on the shores of Fuxian, swallowed whole by an earthquake nearly two millennia ago, mentioned in “Han Shu,” or “The Book of Han,” one of China’s oldest historical texts.
Centuries later, in 2001, an amateur diver spotted large, uniform stones about 300 meters from the shore — square and triangular blocks, something resembling a staircase, and remnants of a wall. He reported the discovery to authorities, sparking a frenzy of media speculation and archaeological expeditions. The “sunken city” was quickly dubbed China’s Atlantis.
A scientific survey was launched, using sonar and remote-operated vehicles to map the lakebed. Scans revealed formations stretching over an area of 2.4 square kilometers, and carbon dating showed one of the artefacts brought up was 1,750 years old.
The report stopped short of declaring answers, leaving more questions than conclusions. While some claimed the “ruins” were just natural geological features, the findings were enough to confirm a legend, which then helped draw divers to Fuxian.
Kris, however, gives the ruins little thought. “I once saw something that kind of looked like a cobbled street,” he recalled later. “But we can’t dive there anymore.” Unlike the freewheeling days of early exploration, diving in Fuxian Lake is now confined to designated zones near the shore.
In this officially approved stretch of lakebed, far from the ruins, life carries on in smaller details. Invasive species thrive in the shadows here: Big-lipped, bug-eyed gobies dart across the mud. Spooked by divers, catfish slide into the forests of waterweeds — newcomers, brought here when one of the lake’s native species, Silurus grahami, was fished to near extinction.
Amid the strands of swaying green, a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses hang suspended. Kris claims both as trophies, before moving on.
His torch beam catches a faint edge, breaking the smooth monotony of the mud. A narrow shape emerges — unmistakably man-made. It’s a fishing boat, a traditional local craft, its slender hull stretches out with an extended bowsprit.
The mooring line still clings to its frame, and mats of algae drape over its surface like heavy curtains. Half-claimed by the mud, it’s one of Fuxian’s few recognizable landmarks, but human traces are everywhere down here.
Scattered across the lakebed are abandoned fishing nets, long mesh tubes lying heavy in the mud. Fish swim in, but few ever swim out. Detached from their floats, the nets have sunk deep, their algae-covered coils emerging briefly in the torchlight before vanishing again into the gloom, like tunnels into nowhere.
Clearing them is an ongoing task. Local authorities organize regular campaigns, relying on divers like Kris to wrestle the nets free. Working in near-darkness, clouds of mud swirling around them, they attach ropes to haul the heavy traps to the surface.
“Pretty hardcore,” says Kris.
The divers
Most dives start at the Fuxian Dive Garden, a leafy courtyard tucked along the lake’s eastern shore.
Run by Yang Weikui, better known in the local diving circuit as KK, the center has become a cornerstone of Fuxian’s small but devoted diving community. Originally from Yunnan’s Lincang City, about 200 kilometres southeast of Kunming, KK first tried diving over a decade ago. “It was a pivotal moment in my life,” he says. “The first time I went underwater, everything changed. I knew this was where I wanted to be.”
Now in his mid-30s, he opened his first dive center on the lake’s western shore in 2012 before eventually moving operations here.
In the late morning, the courtyard is full of divers and their gear. Some returning from a dive, others about to waddle to shore, their heavy tanks loaded onto a tricycle. The veterans are efficient, the beginners fumble. But both are looking forward to beer and barbecue in the evening.
KK is about to lead yet another group of divers into the lake. “You form very close bonds with people underwater,” he says, adding that he met his wife while diving at Fuxian.
“On land, you might be a big successful businessman, but underwater? That matters zilch.” Ask KK about the sunken city, and he shrugs. “It’s not like there are full buildings down there,” he says. “Just some regular-shaped stones, probably natural formations…”
In recent years, scuba diving has surged in popularity across China, especially among younger generations born in the 1990s and 2000s. By 2020, one in 10 divers worldwide was Chinese. The number of Chinese divers certified by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) had been growing by nearly 40% annually — eight times the global average.
Yet diving options within China remain limited. Most of the coastline is muddy and cold, and popular spots like the southern island province of Hainan are overcrowded and expensive, with little sea life to observe.
“Sanya is for people who want to try diving, take a few photos,” KK explains. “But here, people come to kao zheng — to get officially certified, and to become better divers.”
And Fuxian delivers.
“It forces you to sharpen your skills,” asserts Kris. “You have to be better with your buoyancy because it’s freshwater, better with navigation because visibility is poor.”
It’s a level of skill divers who learn to dive in warm, clear tropical waters rarely need.
Kris sums it up: “People get lost, someone kicks up silt from the bottom, and suddenly nobody can see anything. You have to regroup, find each other, and resurface. It’s more common here to really put your training to the test.”
Weekend regulars bring their family members, who now learn to dive in the same waters. The trips are as much about diving as about escaping the heat and bustle of cities for a weekend of barbecues, dishes of wild mushrooms, and the cool air of Yunnan’s mountains.
For longtime regulars like accountant-turned-diver Yang Fukun, Fuxian is a diving “alma mater.” “If you learn to dive in the warm sea, you come to Fuxian and you don’t dare to go down,” he says. “But if you learn here, and then go to the tropical sea, you can just relax and enjoy.”
That passion keeps the lake alive, at least in summer.
Apart from KK, there are around a dozen other licensed dive operators at Fuxian. Business is good, he says, but heavily seasonal — summer is by far the busiest time of year, while winter brings a long lull as the lake turns too cold for most divers. “We have to try to stretch what we make in the summer over the whole year,” KK adds, shaking his head.
On this summer day, divers are preparing for the final ritual of a dive weekend. For now, the beer stays on ice. It’s time for the night dive.
The dark
When night falls, the lake shore becomes pitch dark, and the water is even darker. Two other divers are preparing in the shallows, next to their instructor. The night dive is part of their kao zheng, or certification, to become Advanced Open Water Divers.
One diver is Hu Qimeng, a leather craftsman from Kunming. Beside him floats his teenage niece, Hu Gelin, her torch beam jittering across the water’s surface.
Asked if she’s scared of diving in pitch-black water, Gelin just scoffs. At 14, she’s already a veteran — she’s been here many times before and completed her first dive in Fuxian when she was just 6.
The pair slip below the surface, their torch beams swallowed almost instantly by the dark.
Down here, it’s easy to forget what the lake once was — a chasm torn open by tectonic shifts between 2 and 5 million years ago. Isolated by the Yunnan Plateau, Fuxian became a world of its own, home to species found nowhere else on Earth. It is China’s second deepest freshwater lake and one of the largest lakes by volume.
For millennia, its waters remained pristine, clear enough even now to drink untreated — a sharp contrast to Dianchi Lake, just a short drive away in Kunming, where the water is now sludgy green from algae feasting on the organic pollution that has overwhelmed it.
But Fuxian’s pristine clarity is only skin deep. Invasive species now abound in the lake’s waters, while many native species, some only found in Fuxian and nowhere else, have become highly endangered and even extinct. Over the last three decades, Fuxian Lake has lost five of its 15 native fish species, including the flagship Fuxian carp, overfished to extinction.
The kanglang fish — its name meaning “anti-wave” — nearly followed, driven to the brink as a tourist delicacy in the 1990s before a breeding program pulled it back. Kanglang may be common in Fuxian again, but most of the fish a diver is likely to see, including on a night dive, are invasive species.
As we float deeper into the lake over the forests of waterweeds, hundreds of small, arrow-shaped and aircraft-gray fish flee our torch beams into the darkness. They are icefish, also known as noodlefish. Introduced into Fuxian in the early 1980s, these tasty and fast-breeding invaders have wreaked havoc on the ecosystem of Fuxian, outcompeting and eating the native species.
Suddenly, Kris stops, raises a hand, and switches off his torch.
One by one, the torches go out. Everything disappears. The water is so impenetrably black that you cannot see your arms in front of your mask.
In this perfect darkness, the mind goes to work, filling the waters below with twisting cobbled streets, collapsed stairways, and the ruins of mighty walls lost to an earthquake centuries ago.
Then, Kris’s flashlight snaps back on. The illusion breaks, and it’s just silt, waterweeds, and icefish darting away from the light.
Further from the shore, boats lie forgotten, and fish languish in long-abandoned nets. Beyond where divers are allowed to go, the lakebed lies undisturbed, soft as ash, hiding secrets Fuxian has no intention of revealing.
Editor: Apurva.
(Header image: A diver in Fuxian Lake, Yunnan province, 2024. Courtesy of Kris Ariel)
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