Gantang Lake holds the Yanshui Pavilion in its center, an island structure that acts less like a building and more like a vessel anchored in the city’s memory. The white walls and flying eaves reflect clearly in the water, presenting an image of Southern Chinese garden tranquility.

Yet, the ground beneath these leisure spaces has a harder history. Legend places this site as the Dianjiang Tai, the command platform where General Zhou Yu trained his naval forces during the Three Kingdoms period. The view that now frames willows and distant city lights once looked out upon rows of warships preparing for the existential clash at Red Cliffs.

Time and poetry transformed this military outlook. In the Tang Dynasty, the exiled poet Bai Juyi stood here, struck by the way the fog settled over the lake surface, and christened it the "Pavilion of Mist and Water." This literary intervention redefined the space. A nine-twist bridge now links the shore to the island, forcing visitors to slow their approach and observe the shifting angles of the architecture. Inside, the complex functions as a series of compact, interconnected spaces—halls, shrines, and terraces—that turn inward toward private courtyards while borrowing the expansive scenery of the lake.

The structure survives as a physical anthology of Jiujiang, preserving the tension between the drum of war and the silence of the scholar’s brush.