Culture and Mythology
The area is well known in Chinese history and literature. Dragon boat racing is said to have begun on the eastern shores of Dongting Lake as a search for the body of Qu Yuan (屈原), the Chu poet (340-278 BC), and a dragon-king is said to live at the bottom of the lake.
Junshan (君山), which was formerly a Daoist retreat, is a famous one-kilometer island with 72 peaks in the middle of the lake. The island is also famous for its Junshan Yinzhen tea. The basin of Dongting Lake and its surrounding area is famous for its scenic beauty, which has been encapsulated in the phrase 瀟湘湖南 (Xiao1-Xiang1 Hu2nan2; "Hunan of the Xiao and Xiang rivers").
The scenery of the Jiuyi Mountains (九嶷山) and of the Xiao and Xiang rivers below is often mentioned in Chinese poetry. During the Song Dynasty, it became the fashion to paint this region's scenery in a set of eight scenes, usually entitled as Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang (瀟湘八景). The fashion spread to Japan, where eventually other famous places were substituted for the Xiao and Xiang rivers.
Read more about this topic: Dongting Lake
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