A quieter shoreline
An earlier visual record preserves a landscape with fewer contemporary markers, allowing the water and surrounding mountains to dominate the scene.
Environmental & Oral History
Watershed
Memory
流域记忆
An Environmental and Oral History of Yanqi Lake and Baili Gallery —
tracing how water, landscape, communities and memory have changed
together over time.
01 / Introduction
The Project
A landscape is never only a landscape.
Water records change quietly. So do the people who have lived beside it.
Watershed Memory explores the environmental and human histories surrounding Yanqi Lake and Baili Gallery. Rather than treating the landscape as a fixed scenic background, this project approaches it as a living archive — shaped by water, geology, settlement, development, restoration and everyday life.
Through landscape observation, historical images and oral accounts, the project asks how communities remember environmental change: what has disappeared, what has been rebuilt, what remains familiar, and how people's relationships with the land have changed alongside the landscape itself.
02 / Landscape
Water as an archive of place.
Valleys, lakes and mountain corridors form a continuous landscape. Their appearance changes with seasons and human intervention, yet water continues to connect places that may otherwise seem separate.
03 / Deep Time
Geological Memory
Before memory became human.
The history of a watershed begins long before written records. Rock, sediment, river channels and fossilized material preserve another scale of time — one measured not in generations, but through geological transformation.
Within this longer history, human settlement becomes only one layer. Roads, villages, reservoirs and tourism infrastructure enter a landscape that already carries traces of much older environmental processes.
Landscape becomes an archive when we learn how to read its layers.
04 / Everyday Landscape
Living Waters
Between scenery and everyday life.
Water is not only something to be viewed. Around lakes and mountain valleys, it has always been connected to movement, settlement, work, leisure and community life.
As places become scenic destinations, the same landscape can acquire new meanings. What was once familiar and ordinary may later be photographed, landscaped, protected, promoted or remembered.
How does a place change when the landscape people once lived within
becomes a landscape that others come to visit?
Watershed Archive / 04
05 / Transformation
Then / Now
Historical photographs allow environmental change to become visible. Looking at the same landscape across different moments reveals not only what has changed physically, but also how the meaning and use of the place have been transformed.
A new relationship with the lake
In the contemporary landscape, architecture, public space and managed vegetation have become visible parts of the watershed, reflecting a different relationship between nature and development.
06 / Oral History
Landscapes change.
Voices of Place
Landscapes change.
People remember.
Oral history adds something that maps and photographs cannot fully
preserve: the experience of change.
Memories of old roads, former homes, agricultural work, changing occupations, tourism, relocation and environmental improvement reveal how large transformations are experienced at the scale of individual lives.
These memories do not simply explain what a place once looked like. They show how people understood the changes happening around them, and how communities adapted as the meaning of the landscape changed.
Memories of old roads, former homes, agricultural work, changing occupations, tourism, relocation and environmental improvement reveal how large transformations are experienced at the scale of individual lives.
These memories do not simply explain what a place once looked like. They show how people understood the changes happening around them, and how communities adapted as the meaning of the landscape changed.
01
What did this place look like before?
02
Which changes did local residents notice first?
03
How did changing landscapes reshape everyday life?
04
What remains when the physical landscape is transformed?
07 / Continuing Memory
The watershed
continues.
Water moves through mountains, villages and changing landscapes. Memory moves differently — through photographs, stories, observations and generations.
Neither remains completely unchanged. Yet traces of earlier landscapes continue to exist within the places we see today. To follow the watershed is therefore also to follow a history of adaptation, transformation and remembrance.
Water carries the landscape forward.
Memory carries the landscape back.
Memory carries the landscape back.
08 / Approach
Reading the Watershed
Three ways of remembering a place.
01
Landscape Observation
Reading water, vegetation, geological formations, settlements and infrastructure as interconnected elements of a changing environment.
02
Visual Comparison
Placing historical and contemporary images together to examine visible changes in shorelines, settlement patterns and the human use of space.
03
Oral History
Listening to local memories in order to understand how environmental transformation was experienced, interpreted and remembered by people themselves.