Balkhash Lake in Central Asia:/kloc-The largest lake in China 0/80 years ago.

Open the historical atlas, and you will find a huge lake at the western edge of the map in the heyday of the Qing Dynasty, at a plump rooster's tail. It was the largest lake in China in Qing Dynasty: Balkhash Lake.

The area of Balkhash Lake has reached 1.820 square kilometers, which is close to the area of four Qinghai Lakes and is the 13th largest lake in the world. Lake Balkhash has an amazing circumference of 2,385 kilometers, and the long border between China and Kazakhstan is only 1700 kilometers.

Balkhash Lake is a long and narrow lake, 605 kilometers long, but only 70 kilometers wide from north to south, making it the fourth largest lake in the world.

Because the geological structure belongs to the dammed lake, the average water depth is only 6 meters, the deepest is only 26 meters, and the east is deep and the west is shallow. The average depth in the east is 65438+ 0.7 times that in the west.

This long and narrow lake is divided into east and west parts. Far from the west of China, it is replenished by Yili River, a big river from China, and belongs to the fresh water area. However, the East River injects little water, and the salinity of the lake is as high as five thousandths. So Balkhash Lake is one of the few semi-salty and semi-light lakes in the world.

Historical implication: Li Bai's hometown

In the past, there was a complicated and intermittent connection with China. Lake Balkhash is close to Li Bai's hometown-Broken Leaf City, only a few hundred kilometers away.

According to historical records, there is a sand bowl city 60 miles west of Xiyan, Tingzhou ... 1000 miles west to Broken Leaf City, and the water flows northward into moraine and sea. "Yes, spreading the sea is what people in the Tang Dynasty called Balkhash Lake.

Maybe Li Bai, a teenager, has been here and played in the lake here. But after the Tang Dynasty, it stayed away from China for nearly a thousand years.

During the Qing Dynasty, it was once a nomadic place for Mongols in the western desert, and a powerful Zhungeer khanate was established. After 70 years of tug-of-war with Zhungeer Khan, until the Qianlong period, the army marched westward, wiped out Zhungeer Khan, and established the jurisdiction of General Yili in Xinjiang, so that Lake Balkhash, which had been away from China for thousands of years, returned to the embrace of China.

The Qing Dynasty called it Balkhash Pool because "Balkhash" originated from Kazakh language, which means "grass in swamp". Perhaps in the eyes of the Qing people, the whole Qing empire called the lake too small, and it was more in line with the atmosphere of the Qing empire to call it the pool. After all, the territory of the strong period of the Qing Dynasty was as big as130,000 square kilometers.

Geographical intervention: the son of Ili River

Seen from the satellite, Lake Balkhash looks like a fetus born in Central Asia, and its umbilical cord comes from Ili River in China.

Snow melting in Tianshan Mountain and sufficient precipitation in Yili Valley of China flow into Yili River. The water resources from China, like a mother crossing the Ili River, constantly moisten and nurture her, occupying 78% of the water source of Lake Balkhash and maintaining her life and future.

Yili River is the largest inland river in China and the richest river in Xinjiang. The annual precipitation in the upper reaches of the Yili River reaches 700 mm, and in spring, the mountain snowmelt water enters the Yili River, with a length of only10.5 million km and an annual runoff of10.654,38+0.8 billion cubic meters. In contrast, the annual runoff of the 5,500-kilometer Yellow River is only 58 billion cubic meters, which shows that the Yili River is rich in water.

After crossing Yining, Yili River enters the valley plain, where the riverbed widens, there are many sandbar islands, and the water flows bifurcate, forming a rich delta near the lake area, where reeds are overgrown and everything is lush and extremely rich. It can be said that if one day there is no supply from the Ili River, Lake Balkhash will soon dry up and die.

This used to be the homeland of China, but how did it leave China?

All this is inseparable from friendly neighbor Russia.

As we all know, the territorial ambition of this country is endless. 65438+In the 1920s and 1930s, Russia annexed Central Asia, and after that, it kept spying on the areas east and south of Lake Balkhash, which belonged to China, stealing information and drawing maps to occupy the territory east and south of Lake Balkhash in China.

At that time, Lin Zexu, who was in exile in Xinjiang, had realized: "Russia and Iraq are bordered by China in the northwest, and they are connected by land, so it is impossible to prevent them." The future will be a catastrophe, but it will be heavy and worrying. "

1854, Russia decided to build several fortresses in the east and south of Lake Balkhash, and used these fortresses as bases for military conquest, colonizing at will and occupying local fields and pastures, thus occupying large areas of China in the east and south of Lake Balkhash.

Although the Qing government was aware of Russian aggression and protested against Russian actions, it still demanded that Russian troops immediately "completely withdraw" from the territory of China to avoid occupying Vietnam.

At that time, the Qing government's defense force in the northwest frontier was very weak, so it failed to take actual counterattack actions against Russia's behavior except verbal protest. 1856, the Russian government announced that these China territories were incorporated into Russian territory.

After the Russian occupation, it can't wait to "legalize" the territory occupied by China's northwest frontier for 20 years. The Qing government resolutely rejected this unreasonable request from Russia, saying that China "had already divided Xinjiang's borders" in the northwest, and it was not allowed to be occupied by others.

But by 1860, the Qing government had been hit by two opium wars and was busy suppressing the peasant revolution in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Hui uprising in the northwest. In this situation, the Qing government was deeply afraid that Russia would further expand its troubles in the northwest frontier, resulting in "repeated troubles".

At the same time, "the northwest side is long and hard to prevent", "there is nothing to rely on to discuss the war" and "if you are not allowed to discuss the points according to the agreement, the more you break." Under the coercion and inducement of Russia, we had to sign the Sino-Russian Beijing Treaty and the Sino-Russian Delimitation of the Northwest Border, and ceded more than 440,000 square kilometers of territory in the northwest. Later, according to several demarcation protocols, Russia cut more than 70,000 square kilometers of territory in China. In a short period of more than 20 years, Russia occupied more than 500,000 square kilometers of territory in the northwest frontier of China. In this way, Balkhash Lake, the largest lake in China, became a foreign land.

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Russia occupied these lands and continued to embezzle the territories of neighboring countries, eventually forming an empire with a territory of 22 million square kilometers. But the empire finally collapsed. Lake Balkhash was inherited by Kazakhstan. Who would have thought that Russians would make wedding dresses for others?

Today, the Ili River can still cross the border, enter Kazakhstan, and finally reach Lake Balkhash, quietly nourishing what used to be the largest lake in northwest China, while our border is hundreds of kilometers away.