Fangchuan

Overview

Fangchuan

Fangchuan lies in Fangchuan village, Jingxin township, about 70 km south of Hunchun, Jilin, at the meeting point of China, North Korea and Russia below Zhanggufeng, 3 m above sea level, the lowest point in Jilin. It is only 15 km from the mouth of the Tumen River and the Sea of Japan can be seen from here. From the watchtower on a nearby hill the misty Sea of Japan meets the sky and the scenery of all three countries lies at your feet: the Russian border town of Podgornaya on the left and the North Korean town of Tumangang across the river on the right. The main sights are Lotus Lake, Zhanggu Lake and Zhanggufeng.

Lotus Lake covers 480,000 m², 480 m wide and up to 1,000 m long, with clear water, mountains to the east and forest on three sides; every year it fills with lotus, and in mid-August red, white and pink blossoms shine together with wild duck, seabirds, red-crowned cranes and egrets among them. The late Qing poet Han Wenquan praised it: “in the secluded valley one seems to enter the land of gentlemen; deep in the mountains one glimpses fairy beauties.” Zhanggu Lake, 1 km west of the peak, is 800 m by 700 m and ringed by hills. Zhanggufeng, also Daoshan, stands 1.5 km north of the village on the Chinese–Russian border 40 km up the Tumen, 152 m high, its flat summit a watershed and the frontier; it is famous for the battle of Zhanggufeng (Lake Khasan) between China’s occupiers and Russia, and relics can still be found on its slopes.

The “First Sentry of the East” on the border ridge is named as China’s easternmost frontier post. The Sea-View Pavilion, built in 1993, three storeys and 14 m, stands east of the post, overlooking the Tumangang of Korea, Podgornaya of Russia and the coastal plain of lakes and marshes beyond. The “Tu” boundary marker at the start of the Chinese–Russian border was set up in 1886 when the eastern Hunchun border was re-surveyed: the Qing commissioner Wu Dacheng, a famous epigrapher, argued the Russian surveyors into moving the marker they had placed at Yangguanping north to this point, recovering the Heidingzi area (today’s Jingxin). The granite marker is 1.44 m long, 0.5 m wide and 0.22 m thick, inscribed “Tu marker” on the Chinese side with “erected in the fourth month of the twelfth year of Guangxu” and “T” on the Russian side, the fifth boundary marker set up at that time. The Korea–Russia railway bridge, 650 m long, 20 m wide and 11 m above the river, looms grandly in the mist. The Yangguanping embankment, “the first embankment under heaven”, carries the road from Jingxin to Fangchuan: Fangchuan was once an enclave cut off from the interior, and when the Tumen washed away the narrowest neck at Yangguanping in 1957 local people long had to pass through Russian territory to reach it; the road reopened on 8 August 1983. The embankment is 888 m long and 8 m wide, built of stone in the river, with Russian land on its east side.

Hunchun Siberian Tiger National Nature Reserve

Hunchun has a national nature reserve for the wild Siberian tiger and Amur leopard. UN wildlife experts have confirmed 5 to 7 wild tigers and 2 to 4 leopards here, the highest density in China, and have found a cub’s kill site, showing the tigers are breeding.

News

In May 2007 a farmer injured by a wild tiger became the first person compensated under Jilin’s new rules on damage by protected wild animals. In January 2008 a wild tiger spent 11 hours in a sheepfold near Taiyang village, Banshi township, Hunchun, killing 22 sheep.