Qiandaohu — Thousand Island Lake — is not an ancient landscape but a very young one: a vast reservoir raised in 1959 behind the Xin'an River dam, which flooded two county towns and left more than a thousand forested peaks standing out of the water as islands. Its water is so clean that it bottles a national brand of mineral water straight from the lake, its fish farms are famously organic, and its slow blue mornings have made it the weekend lake of Hangzhou.
