White egrets return to the once-foul Yundang Lake

Today's visitors to Xiamen are often enchanted by Yundang Lake, a huge artificial reservoir that stretches from the geographical center of the city to its western coast.

But they would never think the lake now called "a name card for Xiamen" was once a highly polluted place that appalled residents a few decades ago.

According to Zhang Bin, director of the Yundang Lake Management Center, the lake was originally a natural harbor. It was turned into a lake after the tideland was enclosed for cultivation in 1971.

With rapid economic development of the coastal city in Fujian province came factories built near the lake that discharged huge volumes of effluent into the water, causing severe pollution, Zhang said.

"Two decades ago, the lake had such a bad odor that no taxi would leave its window open when passing by. Flies and mosquitoes were the only things that hovered around the lake," Zhang said.

"The white egrets and other birds that used to stop by disappeared."

In 1988, the Xiamen city government launched a comprehensive improvement project to tackle those environmental issues.

Within three years, 24 kilometers of sewage pipe was laid and a treatment plant built.

In addition to dealing with wastewater, local authorities took a host of other measures to control pollution including supervising and closing chemical and papermaking mills along the shore and empowering law enforcement in the lake district to stop people from throwing rubbish into the water and prohibit illegal construction.

Xu Xiangwei, an official with the Yundang Lake Management Center, called the improvement project "long-term warfare".

"All the companies operating along the bank of the lake that failed to establish a sewage disposal system have been shut down over the years," Xu said.

"So far, there have been five rounds of the project. Dredging and sewage abatement at Songbai Lake located at the upper reaches of Yundang Lake is now underway."

Water quality in the lake showed great improvement in 2012, according to the latest environmental quality report released by the Xiamen Environmental Protection Bureau.

The report said the concentration of inorganic nitrogen and active phosphate - two main pollutants - remained roughly the same as last year, but the concentration of the anionic surfactants, a key ingredient in detergent, showed a 55.6 percent drop from 2010.

Zhuang Shijian, deputy director of the Xiamen Environmental Protection Bureau, said the statistics showed sewage in the lake was under control and gradually reduced.

"Now, the lake is rejuvenated as there are dozens of plant and fish species maintaining the ecological balance. Every local resident is pleased to see the white egrets are back," Zhuang said.

The lake project is one of a series of environmental preservation projects that the city's environmental authorities have worked on to build a "Beautiful Xiamen", a strategy that aims to build a city of ecology, civilization and harmony.

In Tong'an district, livestock and poultry farms were eliminated to combat pollution, while in Haicang district recycled water is now used for irrigation and plants mitigate sewage.

"We'll keep it up with environmental preservation projects to create a greener and more charming Xiamen, laying a good foundation for the 'Beautiful Xiamen' strategy," Zhuang said.

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(China Daily 10/10/2013 page6)