In Huanshan City in East China, a ghostly apparition of an entire city appeared above the Xin’an River as stunned residents looked on. Entire buildings, trees, and mountains rose from the mist at disk, giving off the impression that an entire city had just sprung up out of nowhere.
It occurred after a period of heavy rains, leading experts to believe that’s nothing more than a mirage, caused by light refracting from the cold air of the water below to the warm air above. The result is a reflection in the air.
While a mirage isn’t anything spectacular, the size and clarity of this specific one singles it out at as being of the clearest ever recorded. One resident states it was a like “a fairyland in a movie.”
This isn’t the first time this has happened in China. China Daily published four picture of mirages in 2006 that purportedly showed mirages off the coast of the shangdong province in Eastern China.
I’m gonna go with “ancient death city.” It’s way cooler than mirage.
Huangshan city mirage, all down to bad translation.
Posted by Auki Henry on Sunday, June 26, 2011
Huangshan Mirage Myth The ' Huangshan city mirage ' generated some wildly speculative claims amidst a whirlwind of media misinformation and hype. In a nutshell the reality was bad chinese translation combined with hyper-sensationalist reporting. All the buildings in the footage are real buildings, not visions, mirages or illusions, they actually physically stand exactly where they were filmed. The only thing out of the ordinary here is they are surrounded by floodwater and mist.
Background of the myth: Huangshan City in Anhui Province, China was one city out of a number affected by the 2011 flooding over 12 or 13 provinces. By 14th June 2011 the water had exceeded warning levels in reservoirs and inundated low parts of land near the city.
Incredibly, video footage of the floods, as the waters slowly rose were broadcast, sensationalised and then spread by western media with a completely incorrect story.
An all too literal translation of the english interpretation describing the surreal sight of the buildings looking mysterious as they rose out of the mist above the flood waters ironically fell foul of the 'Chinese Whispers' phenomenon and was circulated via news websites, touted as being an amazing mirage with never before seen clarity.
Presumably this misinformation was passed on in the same hurried fashion endemic to modern media that does away with cross checking of facts in order to increase readership traffic to their sites. Poor journalism indeed!
Predictably the YouTube videos for this went viral, along with the emergence of a multitude of conspiracy and prophecy theories of ranging from hologram technology experiments, the second coming and otherworldy portals.
The truth of course is a little more mundane than the fiction and just doesn't sell a story, the poetic romanticism of 'floating' buildings suspended in mist above the river may be lost in sloppy translation but it strikes me as odd that the worlds media had not linked this footage to the 2011 China floods. It was a mildly amusing that a lot of news sites did try to provide rational scientific explanation of the 'phenomenon' they were reporting on by including videos of scientists explaining how mirages work!
I don't think any amount of science can help them when it comes to poor language translation and lack of basic reference checking however. However if one thing should come out of this whole thing it is that real people have died in this very real flood. Hopefully there's a very real but very unfortunate story that the media SHOULD be covering instead.
Last Edited by on Jun 28, 2011 1:50 PM
WOW - really amazing pictures! I have never seen such before. Proof of the existence of parallel worlds and universes around us, next to us? I am no more surprised by anything in our times of change and transformation.
Thank you Bonnie for posting it : ) . Ute
Edited to add: ; - )
Hi Bonnie, thank you for the update. Though this phenomenon has obviously been cleared up in the article, I stick with my comment above that there are parallel worlds and universes next to us - proven or not in science - as well as that I am basically not surprised by anything anymore in our times. This could also have been true. And - nonetheless great pictures : ) !
Last Edited by on Jun 28, 2011 3:14 PM
