Beijing Water Oral History SerieS
My Home and Water: A people’s Account
Old Beijing’s
Goldfish Ponds
By Wang Jian
Translation by Madeleine Ross and Fang Li
Below is the seventh in a series of oral histories about Beijing water, as told to Wang Jian by Wang
Zhidong, an 80-year-old physicist and lifelong resident of Beijing.
S
eventy years ago, when I was very
young, we lived right near a place called
Lucao yuan or Reed-Grass Gardens in
Chongwenmen District. You might ask why it
was called Lucao yuan. The reason is that in
those days there was a large lake with a lot of
reeds in that area. Xianyu kou or Fresh Fish
Junction was close to our home. Many of the old
hutong (laneways) were arranged on an angle
because they followed the direction of the old
river, and all the houses had been built along its
banks.
My mother often took me back to my
grandfather’s place. He lived on Xiaoshi Da Jie
(Small Market Avenue), in the Jingzhong Miao
(Loyalty Temple) area, where there was a very
well-known lake about half an acre in size. The
manager had used earthen dykes to divide it up
into smaller square-shaped ponds – the original
Goldfish Ponds – where he raised all sorts of
different kinds of goldfish. Willow trees lined all
four sides of the lake, and there was also a small
grove of about forty of them in the southeast
corner, some trees so large that a person couldn’t
put their arms right round them. Every summer
the leaves would create a huge patch of shade on
the ground beneath the trees where pedi-cab and
handcart drivers often took a nap around midday.
It was also a place where kids went to catch
cicadas!
In earlier times, candidates for the civil service
who came to Beijing to sit the exams all loved
spending time enjoying themselves in that
area. Right up until the 1950s people were still
coming into the laneways to sell goldfish in
buckets attached to the ends of their carrying
poles – it was one of Beijing’s famous old sights.
The precious varieties of goldfish to be found in
Beihai and Zhongshan parks had originally come
from these goldfish ponds.
All the goldfish bowls you saw then were the
shallow kind, but if you want to know how deep
the goldfish ponds were, I’ll tell you a story. After
my wife and I got married we were really busy, so
we sent our three- or four-year-old son to live at
his grandparent’s house near the goldfish ponds.
What really worried my mother was the thought
that her grandson would go over to the ponds
by himself. One day, when he was nowhere to be
seen, the neighbours said he had probably gone
over to the ponds. My mother ran over there
after him as fast as she could, forgetting to take
her walking stick, despite the fact that she had
bound feet. She found him playing happily on
one of the dykes, but she didn’t dare call out to
him for fear he’d get distracted and fall into the
water, so the ponds must have been quite deep.
I remember that they used hoses to change the
water in the ponds and the hawkers who sold pet
 Old Beijing‘s Goldfish Ponds | Beijing Water Oral History No. 7 | July 2008
fish used siphons to draw water out of the ponds
to fill their fishbowls. Water automatically seeped
back in and filled the ponds because the water
table was so high in those days.
Only the poor and destitute lived in the vicinity
of the goldfish ponds: pedi-cab drivers, people
with things to sell in their carrying pole baskets,
people selling fish as pets, and people like the
rickshaw man Lucky Camel, in Lao She’s novel.1
The most beautiful fish ponds as well as the
smelliest drains were all in that area. Going
southwest from the goldfish ponds, you’d get to
Rushes Ditch – an area where a sewage drain in
old Beijing ran alongside the old river bed. As it
was a fairly low-lying area with a few bodies of
water, more and more fish breeders tended to
flock there. It stunk to high heaven because of
all the open drains and ditches full of rushes – it
was the open sore of Beijing at the time. After
the communist party came to power, one of their
first projects was to transform Rushes Ditch.
The goldfish ponds were all filled in during
the Cultural Revolution because the river had
already dried up. Now it’s totally covered in tall
buildings.
In the 1940s, I was a student at Qinghua
University. The campus was surrounded
by imperial residences and parks, like
Yuanmingyuan and Yiheyuan, (the old and new
Summer Palaces). How come so much beautiful
scenery was all located in that one area? It
was because there were springs everywhere.
Just listen to the well-known names: Yuquan
Shan (Jade Spring Hill), Wanquan He (Ten
Thousand Springs River) and Daoxiang Yuan
(Rice Fragrance Park). When I was a student,
this whole western area of Beijing was water,
including Xiyuan and Bago, and there were reed
beds everywhere. If you walked in from Haidian
South Road it was all just a crescent-shaped reed
1 Lao She (1899-1966) was a novelist and
playwright born and raised in Bejing. His original
name was Shu Qingchun, and his courtesy name was
She Yu. He is perhaps best known for his novel Camel
Xiangzi or Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse.
2
pond, with the reeds growing as tall as a man.
Houses lined the long strips of road, just like
ridges in fields.
The Beijing Institute of Industry was established
in 1951. Having already graduated, I took up a
teaching position there. That whole area, which
also included the Capital Stadium and Beijing
Zoo, was called Bagou. There was a huge pond
outside the wall of the Stadium and Zoo, and the
Gaoliang River flowed past the walls surrounding
the Institute of Industry. The river is still there
now, but it’s so narrow that only a tiny strip
of water is left – it’s actually the place where
Dowager Empress Cixi would get out of her
sedan chair and onto a boat when she used to go
from the Forbidden City to the Summer Palace.
After getting into a boat she had to travel less
than half a kilometre to get to Baishi Qiao (White
Stone Bridge) – it’s still called a bridge but there’s
not a drop of water to be seen under it any more.
Going further south, you’d come to Sanli He.
Actually, there was another Sanli He, (Three Li
River) near Jingzhong Temple in Zhushi Kou
south of Qianmen (Front Gate), reached by
walking south from the city for three li, which
is how it got its name. The area was dredged
to create a channel for water from the moat to
flow. Further on it was called Shui Daozi (Water
Channel), a name it still retains, and in the past,
that area was nothing but a tract of water. You
know, when I was teaching at the university,
there were streams crisscrossing the whole city –
that’s how plentiful water was in Beijing in those
days.
You must have heard of Guo Shoujing. He was
an eminent 13th century scientist in the Yuan
Dynasty who worked out how to calculate pi
so it was possible to make accurate numerical
calculations to a number of decimal places. Even
before the Yuan capital had been established,
he was able to foresee the difficulty they would
have with transporting tribute grain2 north to the
2 Grain that was for the exclusive use of the
Royal Family.
 Old Beijing‘s Goldfish Ponds | Beijing Water Oral History No. 7 | July 2008
capital. He spent more than two years making a
survey of the springs and rivers systems as well
as taking exact measurements of the terrain in
northwest Beijing. He discovered that water could
be directed west from a very plentiful spring on
the slightly elevated Phoenix Hill, around the
foothills of the Western Hills and from there
toward the southeast, collecting water along
the entire route from all the little springs, then
feeding into Wengshan Bo (now called Kunming
Lake) and eventually following the Gaoliang
River into a holding pond. This irrigation
channel followed the rules of nature rather than
obeying the dictates of man, and was the basis
of the Yuan capital’s settlement and expansion:
a source of plentiful and clean water. It was not
only transportation to the capital that benefitted
from this water – it was also what the ordinary
people of the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties
lived on.
The water in Wengshan Bo was what the imperial
family drank and it was also what was used to
irrigate the paddy rice that they ate. On the other
hand, the grain that the ordinary people ate was
transported on the grand canal to Tongzhou and
then directly into the water holding pond. The
pond got its name at this time. You see, water
from the Western Hills was being brought in
and Zhongnan Hai, Beihai and Houhai were all
linked, which was how the bodies of water in the
inner city came into being. Hundreds of years
ago there was more than enough water for the
one or two million people living in Beijing.
If you want to talk about whether Beijing has
plenty of water or only a little, you have to
take the population and the size of the city into
account. Using the available water resources to
meet the needs of 15 million people or more will
naturally be problematical. Now roads are being
constructed, skyscrapers are being built and the
population has increased seven or eight fold, but
there is no water left, the stands of trees by the
rivers’ edges have gone, and Wanquan He (Ten
Thousand Springs River) has become a drain.
Many of the rivers around Beijing have dried up.
The changes in the last sixty years have been
3
more drastic than in the previous one thousand
years.
Beijing’s lack of water will have the direct effect
of inhibiting Beijing’s development. As early
as the 1950s, the government was aware of the
importance of the water supply but unfortunately
the solution they decided upon was to build
reservoirs. In 1954, Guanting Reservoir was built
with the added benefit that it would assist with
flood prevention. In 1957, another location was
hastily sought out, and the Shisanling (Ming
Tombs) Reservoir was built, but a few years later
it was discovered to be leaking water. At the end
of the 1950s yet another reservoir was built, the
Miyun, but still there wasn’t enough water. In
the 1960s they excavated the Yongding River
diversion canal, later the Jingmi diversion canal,
but the problem remained unsolved. In the 1970s,
I heard that forty thousand wells were sunk
in an effort to extract as much ground water
as possible. In the 1980s, Beijing’s population
steadily increased. The city grew bigger and
bigger and industry began expanding ever more
quickly. To top it off, there was increased use of
water upstream of the Guanting Reservoir, and
a greater volume of effluent release. As a result,
Beijing not only had to cope with a reduction
in water supply but also with serious water
pollution.
Beijing must readjust its industrial structure
and take measures to save water through water
consumption control schemes. Unfortunately at
the end of last century after a series of droughts
and continual water scarcity, we were forced to
use emergency water supplies as a source of
water, and the decision was made to divert water
north from the south. The Yangtze River has
water now, but if there were no more water in
the Yangtze, what would we do? We are heading
for disaster if we deal with water problems by
naively relying on reservoirs and engineering
projects rather than controlling our population
and seriously thinking about the entire situation.
Beijing needs an ever increasing amount of
water. If rivers have none, groundwater is
 Old Beijing‘s Goldfish Ponds | Beijing Water Oral History No. 7 | July 2008
desperately extracted, causing a continuous fall
in the level of the water table. Just think about
it – without water, the soil’s support system
will be lost, so won’t the ground just begin to
collapse? In the past the Xingtai and Tangshan
earthquakes were both felt by people in Beijing.
If the magnitude of those earthquakes had been
greater, and the epicentres had been a little
closer to Beijing, just think what would have
happened! If so much water is taken out of the
water table and so many skyscrapers are built, it
would be strange if there were no collapses.
When Wan Li was the head of the People’s
Congress, he asked the Beijing city government
a number of times how they would solve the
water problem and how they would guarantee
the supply of water. They didn’t seem to have any
sound policies. I heard that they were negotiating
with Hebei Province in the hope that no more
water would be removed from the upstream
counties. I also heard they were going to spend
a 100 million yuan to improve the water quality
in the Guanting Reservoir. When I was young I
never imagined that water supply would become
an issue. Now I’m 80 years old and really worried
for the next generation.
Beijing’s population has increased so much that
the situation is now nearly out of control, and
if it continues like this, the mismatch between
population growth and the water supply will
become even more strained. I’m concerned that
there will come a time in the future when the
people living in Beijing will have to start leaving
– why must we make the ordinary people go
down such a tortuous path!
People in my generation have been through
everything, the disasters of war, hunger
and thirst, all kinds of government political
movements, we’ve seen it all. Who dares to say
that we are not facing up to the water crisis?
Planning and managing water usage will test the
government’s ability and sense of responsibility
– and they’ll be judged by whether or not they
can deal with this challenge. The capital belongs
to all Chinese people: we can’t have favoritism.
We can’t say you can come here, but he or she
can’t. But how this problem will be resolved is
the government’s responsibility – an equitable
solution must be found.
I hope we will have prosperity and stability with
no big ups and downs. The country must develop,
thrive and be strong and society must be stable
– Beijing must not come to grief on account of
water!
Author’s Commentary
Wang Zhidong is a professor at Beijing Institute
of Technology, and a standing committee
member of the Chinese National Physics
Association. As an academic and lifelong resident
of Beijing, Wang has personally experienced all
the changes in Beijing’s water situation. His vivid
memories of plentiful water resources during his
childhood give us a clear picture of what it was
really like. His description shows how Beijing
has gone from having more than enough water
to water shortage, to the point where there is
now a water crisis. He is concerned that once the
insidious and cumulative effects of water scarcity
erupt, the disparity between people’s needs and
available water resources will become too great
and the country will face disaster.
My Home and Water: A People’s Account
 
Beijing, once famous for its sweet spring water
and clear-flowing rivers is now infamous for
its polluted canals and dried up riverbeds. My
Home and Water: A People’s Account provides a
rare uncensored glimpse of life and water in the
ancient capital of Beijing and surrounding areas
– as told by longtime residents.
 
Translation, editing and online publication of
the series by Chinese author Dai Qing and Probe
International has been made possible by funding
from the Foundation Open Society Institute
(Zug). For more information, contact Probe
International at info@probeinternational.org