North Lake Park (Changchun Beihu National Wetland Park), Jilin, China

4Windixon 5:00 PM Aug 6, 2016

Beautiful park for hiking, but strangely empty.
I would please ask Trip Advisor’s editors to title this “North Lake Park (Changchun Beihu National Wetland Park)” because i) local people simply call it Beihu “North Lake” and ii) this title is more consistent with TA’s entry for Changchun’s “South Lake Park” which is this park’s namesake. Also, the Google Map linked in Trip Advisor is off by several kms, which can be easily verified by the fact that the map point is nowhere near water! :) According to Changchun’s tourist bureau, the park’s address is the intersection of Huanhu St. and Longhu Rd. Huanhu (which changes between street and road) is easy to search in Google Maps. Unfortunately, Google is not yet picking up Longhu Rd. For anybody trying to map this place, find Huanhu Rd. on Google Maps and find where it intersects with the 4th Ring Road North and you are basically there. The bridge portion of the ring road is a very large, slightly distant landmark in the main area of the park. Beihu is one of the most perplexing things I have seen in China. This is a bold statement for a country which has an overwhelming (but usually somewhat lovable) mass of contradictions. For anybody that knows modern Changchun, the city is a little rough around the edges, but it is also a booming city that is growing at a frantic pace. It also contains an excellent array of world class, well kept park space. Beihu is the newest park in the city and the actual functional core of this space is very well done. The city has carved dozens of kms of brick/stone/tile/wood pathways around wetlands which contain some bird, fish and plant life. The park itself is a very ambitious project and you can tell that vast sums of money have been spent to construct and landscape the entire thing. Local people have told me that the area actually contained a significant amount of water, but the government has augmented the area with additional artificial waterways. There is a central entrance where most people park their cars and enter the park. I saw no signs of city buses or bus stops, so you probably need to arrive by car at this point. Admission in the summer of 2016 was free. There are motorized private and group tours of the park. Off the main entrance, there is a straight pathway with stock Chinese round arch bridges going over the water. The path contains some nice garden work and sculptures from international artists. This pathway is certainly the busiest area of the park, and most folks could make a return trip to the main entrance in about an hour. The park itself, however, is very large and somewhat disjointed. We did 3, 2-hour hikes (over two days) this summer and only covered a fraction of its total area. There are numerous other entrances around the park, and we entered three of them, quite separated and requiring a ride by car. The pictures I am posting are for the hiking areas off of the main entrance. I can’t say that these photos fairly represent the scale of Beihu. One flank of the park that we walked has a stone terrace that has to be bigger than Tiananmen Square. As a nature experience, this place is fine: however, the experience is dulled somewhat by traffic and railway noise, which is quite noticeable in spots. And while an emperor’s ransom has been paid to create this place, the plant and animal life is not overly abundant, and trees are few and far between in many spots. It is still an excellent park, just not a stunning nature reserve per se. And now for the bizarre! This very expensive and very nice city park is currently in the middle of nowhere, and was almost completely empty on the two weekdays we visited in July 2016. A few years ago, we accidently went to the park on its grand opening, with pomp and ceremony, so it is not brand new. It looks like some level of government envisions this place as being some kind of tourist hotspot, but right now it is floundering. One flank of Beihu has hundreds of empty two story buildings that are supposed to be [from what we could make out] an “ethnic village”, temple, traditional folk zone and resort area. A Chinese TA user has posted photos of it in another review. Some serious architecture and art has been constructed in this area. As of 2016, the area is a new ghost village and we probably passed 10 people in total during the hike and saw maybe 2 functioning businesses. Driving out of this part of the park, we saw hundreds of additional, mostly complete resort buildings in the area. Beihu itself is really isolated. There are hundreds of empty high rise condos in an area called the “New North of Changchun”, but even these ghost condos are car ride away from the park. There are a few functioning seniors’ homes and cottages in the area, but overall it is hard to tell whether Beihu is just a bizarre vanity project, or if it will be the centre of something really amazing. Time will tell.

5Laxiaozi08200912 5:00 PM Apr 13, 2017

Great place to have a swim or a grand view! Aug 2016
Yes! Summer time is definitely the best time for visiting the north lake park! So many beautiful trees and flowers blossomed during that time and many fishermen were fishing at the shores of the lake. You can also take a river on another part of the river; it cost about 20 rmb per hour! It's wonderful