Dongting Lake B&B

Dongting Lake B&B

Dongting Lake is not a lake so much as a mood that changes its boundaries every year, a wide grey water that becomes part of the sky and only occasionally remembers to be wet. On its southern shore, past the reeds and the fishing channels, a single cottage stands on stilts above the mud flat, and its five rooms look out over more water than most people see in a lifetime.

A fishing boat moored in the morning light off the lake

The Rooms

The B&B is a converted fisherman’s staging cottage, rebuilt with a proper kitchen and proper beds but no ambitions toward a hotel. The ground floor is a long room with a wood stove and a table where everybody eats together, and the five guest rooms upstairs are plain timber boxes with one requirement: the window faces the water.

  • Window-of-the-Lake Double — the two front rooms, king bed, window seat; 228 RMB
  • Reed Room — side window onto the reeds where the 麋鹿 (milk deer) sometimes graze at dawn; 188 RMB
  • Fisherman’s Rest — a single bunk in a former drying shed, for those who come to work or not sleep; 98 RMB

There is no wifi to speak of and dinner is the day’s catch — the owner’s brother nets it in the afternoon, and what he does not catch you do not eat. Guests usually have a say in the cooking, which is to say they point solicitously at the chili jar and the whole table laughs.

The Morning Country

A fisherman casting a net in the shallow water at dawn

Dongting’s great secret is that it is emptiest when everyone expects it to be fullest. The famous 洞庭湖景区 is a managed park elsewhere on the shore; here, twenty minutes away by the minibus that runs twice a day, the lake is what it has always been — fishing skiffs, egrets standing in the shallows like white punctuation, a horizon with nothing on it.

Waking at the B&B is waking to the lake’s decision about the day. Sometimes the reeds appear out of mist one by one, like names remembered. Sometimes the water is hammered silver. flowcloud would say that the lake has one lesson, which it teaches every dawn until it stays — that most of what we call landscape is surface, and depth is a matter of patient attention.

The Location

The B&B is on the 君山 (Junshan) shore of the lake, outside Yueyang. Take the minibus from Yueyang HSR station toward Junshan Island and get off at the reed flats; the owner will meet the bus, or you walk the last kilometre of levee. Yueyang and its famous tower are 40 minutes away by the same minibus, so you can do the tourist ceremony — the 岳阳楼 (Yueyang Tower), the poem 岳阳楼记 about a lake that “swallows the sky” — and then retreat to where the lake actually swallows the sky.

Where to stay: Reed flats on the Junshan shore, south of Yueyang, Hunan. Minibus toward Junshan from Yueyang HSR station; tell the driver “reed cottage.” Fish is dinner; the wifi is not. Come in autumn when the lake is its most enormous and the day-trippers have gone home.