Posted on July 20, 2026
By LI MUYUN
For the past four decades, Yang Yijiu, a 76-year-old photographer in Yueyang, Hunan province, has focused his lens on Dongting Lake, artistically documenting its shores, animals, people, and the return of an ecosystem once on the brink of collapse.
“As a little boy, I grew attached to the lake,” Yang said.
“I loved to walk along it and observe everything.”
While working for the local government in the 1980s, Yang came across a scholar’s essay in a journal about the lake’s ecological decline. The writer warned that Dongting Lake, one of the largest freshwater lakes in China, was being choked by silt and land reclamation and could vanish within 50 years. “I couldn’t believe it,” Yang said. “That was the moment I decided to record the lake’s changes through my lens.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Yang spent considerable time focusing on the people who lived along the lake — fishermen who spent their lives on boats and migrant workers who cut reeds and harvested lotus roots. His photos documented the fishing methods that defined that era: the “maze nets” that trapped fish of all sizes and the electric fishing that devastated fish stocks.
In one photograph from the 1990s, a row of cormorants is perched on the bows of fishing boats, their dark silhouettes mirrored in the rippling water below. The birds, with their hooked beaks and long necks, were trained to dive for fish and return to their master’s boats with their catches.
“That scene has already disappeared from the lake,” Yang said.
To restore the ecological health of the Yangtze River, a 10-year fishing ban was implemented in 2021 across key waters of the Yangtze basin, alongside broader efforts to curb pollution and rehabilitate river ecosystems. The cormorant fishing practice, once common across the Dongting Lake region, was banned along with all other forms of commercial fishing.
Yang, armed with his trusted photography equipment, has witnessed gradual changes across the lake since the major environmental protection campaign was launched. For instance, unrestrained sand dredging used to be a serious problem, degrading the lake’s water quality.
“The water used to be muddy yellow most of the time. You would only see clear water during the Spring Festival and National Day holidays, when everything shut down for a couple of days,” he said. “Now, though, it’s clear most of the time.”
The recovery of the lake ecosystem has brought back more wildlife, which has become one of the key focus areas of Yang’s photography over the past two decades.
“Birds are the most joyful thing to photograph,” he said. “Every season brings different species, and each bird has its own rhythm.”
In another photo cherished by Yang, a herd of milu deer quietly enjoys the tranquility found in the bushes in the wetland.
Milu deer, also known as Pere David’s deer, are endemic to China but nearly vanished due to hunting and habitat loss. After they were reintroduced from a British herd, a nature reserve for milu deer was established in 1991 in Shishou, Hubei province, to return them to the wild. During a severe flooding disaster along the Yangtze River in 1998, only a few milu deer made it across the river and arrived at East Dongting Lake in Hunan, where they found a new home. Over time, the herd has grown in numbers.
Today, about 400 milu deer live freely in the region’s wetlands, according to the South Dongting Lake Nature Reserve. However, most images of the milu deer are captured by drone footage, as the animals live deep in the wetlands and seldom appear near the shore. Yang often walks for more than an hour across the reed beds, carrying his heavy camera gear, only to find nothing.
“That happened a lot. Photography on the lake takes luck,” he said with a smile. “But I kept going anyway. You never know.”
That luck found him once when he was deep in the wetlands, and a deer herd emerged from the mist. “The closest one was only 10 or 20 meters away,” he said. “That was the nearest I’ve ever been.”
Another memorable encounter occurred about two years ago when a large herd of milu deer came ashore near the dike. “Some were on the dike, some in the village, running in and out of people’s houses,” Yang said. The local villagers, he said, cautiously kept their distance and didn’t disturb them. He also seized the opportunity to capture some close shots of the animals.
After nearly four decades of photographing the lake, Yang published Shouwang Dongting (Watching over Dongting Lake) in 2019 — a collection of nearly 150 photographs taken between 1981 and 2019. The images depict fishermen at work, birds in flight, the lake in both flood and drought, and the city of Yueyang growing along the shoreline.
Over the last few years, Yang has also been teaching photography at a local senior university. He encourages his students to find their own muse.
“I focus less on techniques and more on ideas,” he said. “I believe it is more important to discover why you photograph and what you choose to see.”
Even in his 70s, Yang has not considered retiring from the field. Dongting Lake, he said, still changes every year.
“There is always something new to photograph,” he said. “As long as I am able to carry the camera, I’ll keep going.”
