A hiker has discovered the truth behind China’s tallest waterfall - revealing that a pipe feeds water into the attraction.
Workers at the Yuntai tourism park have been forced to admit that the waterfall has been getting help from the pipe because of the lack of rainfall.
A video showing water flowing out of the artificial structure built high in the rock face of the Yuntai Mountain Waterfall has been seen over 14 million times on Weibo, China’s popular social media platform. Park officials describe the waterfall as the highest in Asia, with a 314-metre drop. It is located in the Henan province in eastern China.
The Yuntai tourism park released a letter on Tuesday acknowledging that they had installed “small enhancement during the dry season,” blaming seasonal factors.
China is home to just over 17 per cent of the world’s population, but just six per cent of global freshwater resources. The country has recently experience extreme weather events, such as freezing weather in southern China in Spring, and torrential downpours, China Daily reports.
For the last two years, China has experienced a prolonged drought which began in 2022 and was at its worst that August, with lakes and rivers dramatically receding, the BBC reports.
This resulted in surface water resources across the country in 2022 dropping to 7% below the 10-year-average level for 2012-2021.
While workers at the Yuntai Mountain Waterfall using water pipes to supplement the attraction, other changes have been made around the country. First started in the 1950s, the South-North Water Transfer Project aims to lessen the water shortage problem in the north of China, transporting water from the Yangtze River through canals.
It is the most expensive engineering work in the country, and will cost around $62 billion by the time of its completion in 2050.
The East and Middle routes are both in service and can move 20.9 billion cubic meters of water each year, according to earth.org. The country has also had to change the way it produces energy. Hydro generation has been low since 2022 due to a drop in river flows in southwest China.
Instead, the country has been relying more on wind, solar and coal power. Most coal-fired generators in China act as reserve units to meet seasonal demand peaks and are used as back up when hydro generation varies.
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