Xinjiang University "giant red fish" sighting at Kanas Lake

Kanas Lake lies in Burqin County, Altay Prefecture, in the far north of Xinjiang. It sits near the borders with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia. It is China's deepest alpine lake, with a maximum depth of 188.5 metres.

The legends here are old. Since the 13th century, people have told of a creature that drags livestock and horses into the water. One story says Genghis Khan's tomb lies beneath the lake, guarded by a lake deity. Then, in 1980, forest ranger Jin Gang reported a red object over 15 metres long floating in the middle of the lake. The Guangming Daily carried it as the first official report.

July 1985. Associate professor Xiang Lihai led teachers and students from the Xinjiang University Department of Biology to the lake. With them was Yuan Guoying, later of the Xinjiang Environmental Protection Science Research Institute. Accounts place them at the Fish-Viewing Pavilion, watching through a high-powered telescope.

At first, they found nothing. Then came sudden waves. A large blood red, rainbow-shaped fish rose from the water. Through the lens, Xiang dimly saw a red giant beast swim slowly past. Then it was gone. More followed, one in front, one behind.

Yuan later said the largest had a head over a metre wide and a body over 10 metres long. Through the telescope he counted more than 50 fish, large and small. He carried a camera that day. His photographs have never surfaced online.

The team set a huge fishing net, hundreds of metres long. The next day it was gone. After a two-day search they found it two kilometres upstream, with a vast rip in it. Professor Huang Renxin had first suspected red algae. After the net, he turned to a fish, Hucho taimen. Some Chinese accounts tell the torn net story of 1980 instead.

The Xinjiang Daily announced the discovery of giant red fish, 10 to 15 metres long and over 4 tonnes. Xinhua and foreign media took up the story. In 1987 a research team described a school of some 30 to 40 big fish, each three to four metres long. In 1989, after a two-year investigation, scientists concluded they were taimen. Questions remained about their numbers, their age, their maximum size, and whether they really took livestock.

Taimen remains the accepted answer. Surfacing taimen can raise waves easily taken for a monster. In 2022, after a tourist photograph, the scenic area's management committee said simply: "that's just taimen." Not everyone was convinced. Ren Mulian of the Heilongjiang River Fisheries Research Institute said the lake is "too small to accommodate a 10-meter-long Hucho taimen, and the water too cold." Taimen normally reach about 2 metres. And the reported size had shrunk, from 10 to 15 metres in 1985 to 3 to 4 metres in 1987.

Yuan Guoying never let the mystery go. In 2005 he published The Mystery of the Kanas Lake Monster and spoke on CCTV's News Parlour. In 2011 a Sina headline quoted him saying there are 100-metre-long fish in Kanas Lake. Sightings kept coming, including seven Beijing tourists near Sandaowan in 2005. The press reached for the obvious comparison. Kanas became China's Loch Ness.