The dragon fish and the turtle

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In May 1999, a photographer took several photos of the lake. He noticed that there was a fish-shaped thing beneath the surface of the water. It looked like a giant fish, wriggling like a dark shadow. To calculate the size of the mysterious thing, he placed an object in the same spot he caught the fish on his camera and concluded that the "thing" must be around 4 meters in length.

A year earlier, some 60 students from a military academy happened to spot as many as nine "dragon fish" that fit the description of the one in the 1999 photos. In addition, they reportedly saw two black turtles about 2 meters in diameter.

Similar reports have been filed by tourists over the years. But scientists have yet to come up with an explanation what these animals are.

That has not prevented the legend from gaining popularity among the public. It goes that a turtle used to serve as the lake king's foot stand in Dongting Lake over 1,000 km to the north. One day when the king dozed off, he escaped from the underwater palace and crawled through a secret canal to Huguangyan.

At the temple next to the lake, the turtle was mesmerized by the chanting of the monks and forgot to return to his job up north. When the king woke up, he sat back and, without support, fell to the ground. Seeing the turtle was nowhere to be found, His Majesty threw himself into a fury and ordered to drive torrents to the southern lake.

Sensing imminent disaster, the turtle spewed out a pearl from his stomach, which turned into a giant rock blocking the course of the flood. The lakeside community was saved, but the turtle was transformed into a rock.

At the east entrance to the park, there now crawls a 360-ton stone turtle, 22.5-meter long, 18-meter wide and 6.3-meter tall, with a whimsical gaze in his eyes that would be a natural in a Disney cartoon. Next to him stands a 9.9-meter-high "dragon fish", a dragon's head on a fish's body in a buffoonish posture that resembles a masked ball.