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Some months ago, Richard Freeman in his blog was perplexed about the location of a certain Tibetan lake said to house monsters, which I was able to resolve by revealing that for reasons still unknown to me it has been referred to by a variety of different names, of which Lake Wembo is just one.
As it happens, moreover, there is another Chinese 'monster' lake that is mystifying me for a similar reason - over the years, its name has inexplicably changed, causing some confusion at first as to whether the two names did indeed refer to the same body of water.
I refer to what was originally called Lake Hanas, but which in more recent years is now repeatedly called Lake Kanasi. Has the name officially changed, or it is merely a question of a different transliteration from Chinese to English being adopted (as with Peking to Beijing, for instance)?Meanwhile, for anyone who may not know about the fascinating monsters of Lake Hanas/Kanasi, here is what I wrote about them in 2002 within my book The New Zoo: New and Rediscovered Animals of the Twentieth Century .
The Monster Fishes of China's Lake Hanas
Officially, the largest specimen of freshwater fish on record is a 15 ft European catfish Silurus glanis, caught in Russia's Dniepper River sometime prior to the mid-1800s (though this species as a whole is generally shorter than the pa beuk, officially deemed to be the world's largest freshwater fish). As a consequence, the lake-dwelling fishes reported in July 1985 by no less an authority than China's eminent biologist Prof. Xiang Lihao, from Xinjiang University, attracted appreciable scientific interest.
In July, the professor and a party of students arrived at a large but remote body of water called Lake Hanas, situated in northwestern China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region, in order to examine its potential as the site of a future nature reserve. On 24 July, one of the students observing the lake from a watchtower built two years earlier noticed several huge reddish-coloured objects moving at the water's surface. When the professor and students scrutinised them closely through binoculars, they discovered to their astonishment that they were enormous salmon-like fishes, whose heads, tails, and spiny dorsal rays could all be clearly discerned. Just how enormous they were, however, was not revealed until the next day.
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