Throwback Thursday: China's Own Loch Ness Monster?

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our nine-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of the city's past. This week, given that a new image (pictured below) purportedly capturing the world-famous Loch Ness Monster in Scotland has, ahem, surfaced, we thought it was about time China's very own Nessie gets some additional love. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the Tianchi Monster aka the Human-Headed Buffalo-Bodied Volcano-Dwelling Slippery SOB.

Tianchi Lake is a beautiful body of water in a crater atop Changbai Mountain (Changbai Shan) in China’s northeastern Jilin Province on the border between China and North Korea. Its 373-meter depths are purported to be the home of a mysterious, legendary creature(s), known, simply enough, as the Lake Tianchi Monster.

Sightings of the creature (artist's rendition pictured above), which witnesses describe as having a “large mouth” and a “buffalo-shaped” body, date back to 1903. More recent sightings attribute a “human-like head” and grey skin with a white ring around a “1.5-meter neck” to the creature, which some claim to be numerous in the lake.

Some experts draw parallels with creatures mentioned such ancient Chinese tales as the Shanhaijing, which “gives accounts of turtle-shaped animals with a pig's head and black skin.” The Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi also described a “giant and mysterious fish” known as Kun that “lived at the bottom of the Northern Sea” and could transform itself into a bird known as Peng that would fly to the Southern Sea, which happens to be the ancient name for Tianchi.

There have been more than 30 sightings of the “Tianchi Monster” (see one such glimpse of the beast in the picture above) in the past 20 years, including an incident in 2005 when a group of tourists recorded what they claimed to be a “strange, black object emerging from the water and disturbing the calm surface” on film. A local TV crew also filmed what they claim to have been “six seal-like, finned” creatures swimming in pairs near the North Korean border portion of the lake.

Some scientists, however, have their doubts and claim that the lake’s frigid waters are too cold to sustain life. But given the fact that the ocean floor has been found to be teeming with life, maybe it’s not too much of stretch to posit the existence of whatever-the-hell-it-is, be it mammal, fish or tourist trap, that lurks beneath the surface of Tianchi Lake.

– Original article written by Jerry Chan

Images: absolutechinatours.com, theuk.one, kexue.com