Red Lotus Lake (Kumphawapi)

In Thai it is called Talay Bua Daeng, the ‘sea of red lotuses’. Bua daeng means ‘red lotus’, and the word talay, the sea, conveys the impression left by water entirely covered with pinkish-red flowers. The name does not refer to a place with fixed boundaries, but to a landscape that appears each year on part of the lake and fades away at the end of the flowering. Other names say the same thing through other images: ‘Red Lotus Lake’ in English-language publications, or Thung Dok Bua Daeng, the ‘field of red lotus flowers’, as if the expanse of water had become a meadow.¹⁰

The Red Lotus Sea (Kumphawapi Lake) is therefore not a site separate from the lake that holds it. It is the lake’s most flower-covered and most visited part, counted, together with Thale Noi in Phatthalung Province, among the two best-known red lotus fields in Thailand. To understand what people come here to see, one must first look at the lake itself, its history and the way it was formed.⁹

This lake is called Nong Han Kumphawapi, often shortened to Nong Han. It lies north of the town of Kumphawapi, in the district of the same name, about 45 kilometres from the city of Udon Thani, in Isan, the great region of the North-East. Locally it is described as a buengThai term for a large natural body of water, such as a lake or a large pond., that is, a vast natural body of water. Shallow, with an average depth of less than two metres, it is fed mainly by a stream, the Huai Phai Chan Yai, and drains into the Lam Pao.¹¹

It measures at most 7 kilometres in length and 3 kilometres in width, with a surface area of 1.7 square kilometres, or 4.1 square kilometres including the wetland. Its rank among the country’s lakes varies from one account to another. It is sometimes presented as the second natural lake of the North-East, sometimes as one of the largest natural freshwater lakes in Thailand, or even as the largest. It should not be confused with another Nong Han, in Sakon Nakhon Province: that is a separate lake, whose history and data do not apply to the one at Kumphawapi.¹¹

Nong Han Kumphawapi is not an artificial reservoir but a natural lake, whose history is measured in millennia. It formed about ten thousand years ago, at the start of the Holocene, the geological epoch that began at the end of the last glaciation and continues today.³

Its formation has a climatic cause. At that time the summer monsoon, the wind system that each year brings the heavy rains to South-East Asia, grew in intensity. Run-off and humidity increased, and water accumulated permanently in the basin: the lake was born of the climate. The layers of mud that have built up on its bed ever since preserve the traces of variations in that same climate.³

The lake’s exact age is nonetheless a matter of debate. In the 1990s, the researcher D. Penny dated the base of a sediment core, designated KUM.3, to more than twelve thousand radiocarbon years. A core is a long cylinder of sediment extracted vertically, whose successive layers can be read like the pages of a register. Penny had obtained his date from concentrated pollen extracted from these deposits.⁴

The teams who returned to the site in the late 2000s place the start of sedimentation slightly later, a little over ten thousand years ago. They questioned Penny’s date by considering that the dated pollen may have been reworked, that is, eroded from older deposits before being redeposited on the lake bed, which would make it appear older than the layer containing it. Nothing allows the question to be settled entirely.⁴

The lake has attracted scientists since the mid-1990s. At that time L. Kealhofer studied phytoliths, tiny particles of silica produced by plants that survive in the soil after the plants decompose. D. Penny, J. Grindrod and P. Bishop turned their attention to the microfossils preserved in the mud, and towards the end of the decade Penny published a study of several cores, designated KUM.1, KUM.2 and KUM.3.⁴

A new generation of research began in January 2009 and January 2010, with teams brought together around S. Chawchai, among others. The researchers worked from a platform set up on the water and extracted the sediments with a modified Russian corerSampling instrument designed to extract soft, waterlogged sediments without compressing or deforming them., an instrument designed to retrieve loose, waterlogged deposits without deforming them. One of the cores, named CP4, comes from the southern part of the lake. These campaigns complement the earlier sequences and refine their interpretation.²

These sequences have made Nong Han Kumphawapi a reference archive for understanding how the Asian monsoon and the natural environments of the North-East have evolved since the start of the Holocene. The lake is one of the few lake archives of the late Pleistocene, the long glacial period preceding the Holocene, and of the Holocene to have been studied in north-eastern Thailand.³

This rarity gives the site a value that cannot be perceived from the boat. Beneath the flowering surface that visitors come to see, layers of mud accumulated over millennia hold a memory of the region’s climate. The lake that offers its seasonal spectacle is also a scientific document.

Around the open water, the lake extends into marshland. Its vegetation consists of herbaceous mats, floating or partly rooted, which form a shifting transition between water and land. Among the plants identified are a knotweed, Persicaria attenuata, and tall grasses of the genus Saccharum, related to sugar cane. Kealhofer and Penny also described epiphytic ferns there, which grow on other plants without drawing nourishment from them.⁴

This environment is home to many species of birds, which visitors can observe during the season. The site ranks among the most important wetlands of the North-East for its ecology. The pinkish-red flowers that give the place its name are thus only one moment in a wider ecosystem.⁷

The flowering lasts from December to February. The best period begins in late November or early December and continues into February. It is the annual return of the flowers that turns Nong Han Kumphawapi into a ‘sea of red lotuses’.⁹

This spectacle varies from year to year, in both duration and extent. In 2022 the flowering was more extensive than in previous years. In 2024 it lasted into March, which was considered exceptional. These variations are a reminder that the Red Lotus Sea (Kumphawapi Lake) is not a fixed backdrop: it is a living phenomenon that changes with every season.⁷

The large expanses of flowers lie away from the shore and are hard to see from the bank. To discover them, one must therefore take to the water. The boat trip, lasting roughly an hour to an hour and a half, is the site’s main activity: it takes visitors through the flowering expanse, right up to the pinkish-red blooms that cover the water.¹⁰

This way of visiting comes with a few rules, which visitors were reminded of in 2022: wear a life jacket throughout the trip and throw no rubbish into the water. These instructions are aimed at both the safety of passengers and the cleanliness of the lake.⁸

The site is presented as a destination for nature and community-based tourism, and it is promoted by the Udon Thani office of the Tourism Authority. The communities living on the shores of the lake take part in this activity.⁷

Tourism, however, is only one way of recognising the value of the place. A university study, based on fieldwork and interviews with specialists and members of the lakeside communities, attributes three values to it: nature and the environment; history, society and culture; and tourism.⁶

The preservation of the lake falls partly to the state. In 2017 the Department of Water Resources was running a project to conserve and restore the Nong Han Kumphawapi wetland, which Thailand presented among its actions in support of wetlands.¹

What is at stake bears directly on the landscape that visitors come to see. The extent and duration of the flowering change from one season to the next.⁷

A piece of university research, based on the same fieldwork, proposed managing the wetland by distinguishing four levels of protection. The first corresponds to strict conservation. The second combines strong conservation with controlled use. The third provides for moderate conservation, and the last for low conservation, applied to the lakeside areas.⁶

This division reflects a way of thinking about the lake not as a uniform whole, but as a set of environments with different uses, from the heart of the marsh to the inhabited shores. It acknowledges a simple situation: the same expanse of water is at once an ecosystem, a living place for the lakeside communities and a tourist destination.