The Songhua River wetlands are the reed marshes, sedge meadows, oxbow lakes and shallow lakes of the Songhua basin in Northeast China, in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces. The Songhua is the longest tributary of the Amur and flows about 1,897 km from the Changbai Mountains on the North Korean border. It drains a basin of 557,180 km², and it meanders so much across the flat Northeast China Plain that it has left oxbow lakes all over it. The best-known wetlands are on the Songnen Plain around its largest tributary, the Nen, and on the Sanjiang (Three Rivers) Plain, where the Songhua, Amur and Ussuri meet. The Sanjiang Plain covers about 109,000 km² in total, shared between China and Russia. Zhalong Nature Reserve, created in 1979 and covering 2,100 km² of marsh, is listed as Ramsar Wetland of International Importance no. 549. Honghe National Nature Reserve, made a provincial reserve in 1984 and a national one in 1996, is also a Ramsar site. These wetlands are breeding grounds for the endangered red-crowned crane, and over the past century they have faced four main pressures in turn: farming, dams, oil and chemicals, and a drying climate.
Draining the Sanjiang and Songnen Plains for Grain
The first and broadest pressure came from the plough. The Songnen Plain, built by the Songhua and the Nen, sits on chernozem, a black soil that makes the Northeast China Plain the third-largest black-soil region in the world, after the East European Plain and North America's Great Plains. The Qing ban on Han settlement in Manchuria broke down in the mid-19th century, after Russia annexed the lands north of the Amur under the Treaty of Aigun, and millions of Han settlers moved in during the migration known as Chuang Guandong. Since the early 20th century, the area farmed in Heilongjiang's black-soil belt has grown almost a hundredfold. After the 1960s, farming there became heavily mechanised and used far more fertiliser.
Wet ground made the best farmland once it was drained, and the marshes paid for it. Heilongjiang now has China's largest rice, corn and soybean plantations: 14.37 million hectares of grain, including about 4 million hectares of rice. The province is one of Asia's leading producers of japonica rice, and cold-tolerant varieties have raised its rice output sharply in recent years. Reclaiming wet land for this kind of farming took a large share of the region's marshes.
The red-crowned crane shows what this cost. In the 1960s, reclamation in Northeast China and the Russian Far East took over its nesting marshes and cut the waterways that linked them. Burning and land clearing destroyed the tall reeds it nests in. Several of China's main breeding areas lie in the Songhua basin: the Sanjiang Plain and the Wuyuer River basin in Heilongjiang, and in Jilin, Xianghai Reservoir and the lower Huolin River, a tributary of the Nen. The bird is listed as Endangered by the IUCN and is a Class I protected species in China. Winter counts in 2020 recorded more than 3,800 red-crowned cranes in total, but only about 350 of them in China, and the migratory population that winters in China is the one that is falling fast.
Fengman, Baishan and Nierji: Dams on the Songhua and the Nen
Large-scale damming of the Songhua began early. Construction of the Fengman Dam, 20 km from Jilin City on the Second Songhua, started in 1937 during the Japanese occupation. Its reservoir began filling in November 1942, and the first generators ran by March 1943. The dam was not fully finished until 1953. Its reservoir, also called Songhua Lake, holds about 11.46 billion m³ and covers about 550 km². The power station was expanded in stages to 1,002.5 MW. Between 2015 and 2019 a new dam was built 120 m downstream, half as tall again as the old one and with 50% more generating capacity, and the old wall is being taken down.
Upstream, the Baishan Dam was begun in May 1975. Its reservoir started filling on 16 September 1982, flooding 17.67 km² and displacing about 10,300 people. It generates 1,500 MW, plus 300 MW of pumped storage added between 2002 and 2006. The Hongshi Dam sits between Baishan and Fengman. On the Nen, the Nierji Dam was built between 2001 and 2006 on the border of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang. Its reservoir holds 8.61 billion m³, and it is used for flood control, power (250 MW), navigation and water supply. In 2007 another dam near Bayan, 50 km northeast of Harbin, created the Dadingshan Reservoir on the main stem.
Flood control is one of the main purposes of these dams, and the floods were real. In summer 1998 the Nen and the Songhua flooded at the same time as the Yangtze, and the Nen flooded again in 2005. But wetlands depend on high water in spring and summer to refill their marshes, and a regulated river does less of that. The Fengman reservoir shows how uneven the flow is. Average inflow is about 426 m³/s, but it can reach 22,800 m³/s in a flood and fall to 10 m³/s under winter ice, since the river is frozen from late November until March. Storing the peaks protects Jilin City and Harbin, but it can also take away the flood pulse the marshes downstream once relied on.
Daqing Oil and the Benzene Slick of November 2005
Industry came to the wetlands with oil. On 26 September 1959 the first well struck oil at Daqing, between the Songhua and the Nen, on the same Songnen Plain where the marshes lie. The field was named "great celebration" because the find came four days before the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic. Daqing is China's largest oil field. It held about 16 billion barrels at the start and has produced more than 10 billion since 1960. It made Manchuria a national centre of the oil industry, and Daqing city and the oil field shared one administration until 1983.
The river's worst pollution came from chemicals. On 13 November 2005, a series of explosions at the No. 102 Petrochemical Plant in Jilin City killed six people and put an estimated 100 tonnes of pollutants containing benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua. An 80 km slick moved downstream through Songyuan. Harbin, which then had nearly ten million people and took its water from the river, shut off its supply from 24 to 27 November. On 25 November, nitrobenzene at Harbin measured 33 times the national safety limit. The city drilled 95 extra deep wells and trucked in water and activated carbon. The slick passed Jiamusi, reached the Amur on 16 December and arrived at the Russian city of Khabarovsk four to five days later. China sent 1,000 tonnes of activated carbon to Russia. Xie Zhenhua, head of the State Environmental Protection Administration, resigned. On 28 July 2010, floods washed several thousand barrels from two chemical plants in Jilin City into the river, some of them holding about 170 kg of explosive material.
Zhalong, Honghe and Lake Khanka: Reserves Along the Crane Flyway
Zhalong, established in 1979, is the best-known of the basin's reserves. It lies in Heilongjiang and covers 2,100 km² of freshwater marsh, streams and reed-fringed ponds. More than 300 bird species have been recorded there. The reserve lies on a migration route from the Russian Arctic around the Gobi to Southeast Asia, and birds use it from April to October. It is also one of the few breeding grounds in the Far East for the marsh grassbird. Zhalong keeps a captive flock of red-crowned cranes for conservation. Its wild cranes feed mostly on small fish under 10 cm, such as common carp and pond loach, and on snails and water insects. That diet depends on the marsh staying wet.
On the Sanjiang Plain, Honghe National Nature Reserve protects 218.35 km² of marsh. It was set up as a provincial wetland reserve in 1984, upgraded to national status in 1996, and is listed under the Ramsar Convention. Its 173 recorded bird species include Oriental white stork, white-naped crane, Steller's sea eagle and whooper swan. A 2009 study of its historical survey records documented marsh degradation and changes in its water regime from both natural and human causes. Further southeast, Lake Khanka (Xingkai Lake) lies on the Russia–China border. In April 1996 the two governments agreed to join Russia's Khanka Reserve and China's Xingkai Lake reserve into one international reserve. The lake is at the centre of the red-crowned crane's breeding range.
By the end of 1999, China had set up 33 nature reserves mainly for the red-crowned crane, covering about 3,099,000 hectares. Among the key ones are Zhalong, Momoge, Xianghai, the Sanjiang (Three Rivers) reserve and Xingkai Lake, all in China's northeast. Their cranes link these wetlands to the Chinese coast. Birds from Zhalong and Xianghai fly south in autumn by way of Panjin and the Yellow River Delta to winter at Yancheng in Jiangsu. Birds from the Sanjiang Plain and Xingkai follow the Ussuri and winter in Korea near Panmunjom. The reserves now face a pressure that boundaries cannot stop. The Far East has been getting drier, and with the dams holding back floods and the paddies drawing water, the remaining marshes get less water than they used to.
The rivers themselves cross borders as well. The Songhua itself ends in the Amur at Tongjiang, and the Amur carried the 2005 slick into Russia, as described in our Amur River guide. In winter the frozen Songhua at Harbin becomes the setting for a city-wide winter festival, the subject of our Harbin Ice Festival guide.