Poyang Lake

Il suo bacino idrografico si estende per oltre un milione e ottocentomila chilometri quadrati, drenando le acque di un territorio che accoglie oltre quattrocento milioni di abitanti e genera un terzo dell'intera produzione agricola e industriale della Cina.

Questo immenso sistema fluviale ha funzionato per millenni come corridoio biogeografico primario, ospitando oltre quattrocento specie ittiche autoctone, centinaia di specie di uccelli migratori dipendenti dai laghi alluvionali di Poyang e Dongting e una flora ripariale ricchissima di endemismi botanici.

La transizione rapida verso l'industrializzazione pesante ha tuttavia stravolto la dinamica idraulica naturale, canalizzando gli argini, sottraendo pianure golenali per l'urbanizzazione e immettendo milioni di tonnellate di reflui azotati e fosfati nei sedimenti fluviali.

La diga delle Tre Gole e la frammentazione degli habitat.

Yeah, that was cool.

I went there with St. George, did Poyang Lake.

That's a 10-day race.

Bloody hot.

On April twenty-first, sixteen seventy-four, however, Geng took up arms against the Qing, pronouncing himself as marshal of his armies and restoring Ming customs in Fuzhou.

Fang Cheng Mo and his followers were seized and then thrown into prison, and Geng sent one wing of his army under Zheng Yanxing into Zhejiang, where it broke through to the coast in June and personally led another wing into Jiangxi, reaching Poyang Lake by the end of July sixteen seventy-four.

Meanwhile, at Chaozhou, across his southern border in Guangdong, General Liu Jingzhong joined with Geng's rebellion on May twenty-fifth, sixteen seventy-four.

The Kangxi Emperor's reaction was initially conciliatory.

On April 22nd, he wrote to his sons in Hunan a letter he described in his diary as his will, his second in five months.

The situation, he told them, was as bleak as January 1855, when he had lost his fleet on Lake Poyang and tried to take his own life.

Quote, 'We are surrounded on all sides.

Our supplies are all cut off.

On April 22nd, he wrote to his sons in Hunan a letter he described in his diary as his will, his second in five months.

The situation, he told them, was as bleak as January 1855, when he had lost his fleet on Lake Poyang and tried to take his own life.

Quote, We are surrounded on all sides.

Our supplies are all cut off.

14 hours, and the bishop of Rome became a man with a passport.

On this day in 1363, on China's Lake Poyang, a self-made emperor died trying to escape a lake set on fire on purpose.

For the gallery, our arts and culture critic, Margaux Delacroix.

Margaux?

"When you approach the enemy boats, first fire the firearms, then the bows and crossbows, and when you reach their boats, then attack them with hand-to-hand weapons." And Chen Youliang? After weeks trapped on the lake, he tried to break out for the Yangtze and took an arrow to the head.

His men surrendered.

So the Battle of Lake Poyang ends with a man who had crowned himself dying among burning straw men, and the rebel who lit them going on to rule as the first Ming emperor.

On this day, the record runs from a coronation in Rome to a beeping ball in orbit.