China's own Loch Ness Monster?

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 (pictured below on livingdinos.com), 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” (pictured left on chinaorg.cn) in the past twenty 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. And just last week on September 6, a local TV crew 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.

Links and Sources:
China Daily: 'Monster' of Tianchi Lake sighted
Thisisthelife.com: Tianchi Lake
The Sydney Morning Herald: China's 'Loch Ness Monster' resurfaces
Livingdinos.com image
Chinaorg.cn: It's the Tianchi Lake 'Monster'