DgcityTwo landscapes once written off as beyond repair now offer quiet evidence of how persistent ecological restoration can work: a lake reborn between two deserts in Gansu and a coastal estuary in Liaoning where red-crowned cranes have returned.
Qingtu Lake sits at the lower end of the Shiyang River in Minqin County, wedged between the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts. It dried up in 1959 after upstream water use shrank inflows, and its exposed bed became a 13-kilometer belt of blowing sand, the largest gap in Minqin’s northern windbreak.
Bringing it back required engineering as much as patience. Since 2001, water from the Yellow River has traveled through a canal more than 260 kilometers long, lifted nearly 500 meters uphill by 13 pumping stations and blended with local supplies before reaching the basin. In 2010, the first large release formed a three-square-kilometer lake. After more than a decade of transfers and rising groundwater, Qingtu now covers 27.65 square kilometers.
Minqin itself was once described as a county at risk of being swallowed by sand. Grassy shorelines around the reformed lake now hold the dunes back and support returning birds, part of a wider effort across the Hexi Corridor to balance irrigation with ecosystem survival.
Far to the northeast, the Daling River estuary near Jinzhou tells a parallel story. Years of coastal restoration, removing embankments, dredging creeks and replanting native reeds and the red-flowering Suaeda salsa, have improved the wetland’s water circulation by about 30 percent. Bird numbers and variety have climbed, and red-crowned cranes, among the rarest cranes on Earth, have come back to the tidal flats. Some former fish farmers now work as wardens guarding the birds they once competed with.
Both projects sit inside a national framework that has reshaped rural China for a generation: farmland returned to forest, grazing bans on vulnerable grassland, logging restrictions and cash payments to households that give up extraction-based livelihoods. Critics note the costs, from resettlement to limits on traditional farming, and scientists caution that revived lakes still depend on continued water transfers rather than natural balance. But for now, cranes nesting on the estuary and water lapping at Minqin’s dunes are the kind of results officials point to as proof the decades of intervention worked.
Neither recovery happened quickly. Both depended on years of water transfers, changed livelihoods and accepting that some marginal land and water were worth more as habitat than as farm or fishpond.
