Yueyang occupies the north shore of Dongting Lake, once China's largest freshwater lake before twentieth-century drainage works reduced it to second place. The city's great monument is Yueyang Tower, one of the "Three Great Towers of Jiangnan" and the oldest of the three, rebuilt multiple times over fourteen centuries and currently presenting a Song-dynasty silhouette on a promontory above the lake. Its permanent place in Chinese cultural memory was secured by Fan Zhongyan's 1046 essay, which used the view from the tower as a meditation on public service and coined a phrase — "first to bear hardship, last to enjoy comfort" — that became a moral touchstone in Chinese politics and remains in circulation today.
From the pier below the tower, boats cross to Junshan Island, a low island in the lake famous for producing Junshan Yinzhen, one of the ten most celebrated teas in China. The tea is made from the small yellow-green shoots of a cultivar grown only here; a cup produced from leaves harvested in spring shows the individual buds standing upright in the glass before slowly sinking. The island's plantations are open for tasting, and the combination of lake air, bamboo groves, and unhurried pace makes the boat trip worthwhile even for non-tea-drinkers. Boat tours of the lake itself take 90 minutes to two hours and provide a different perspective on the tower.
Yueyang also claims to be the birthplace of the Dragon Boat Festival tradition. The Miluo River, which enters Dongting Lake east of the city, is where the poet Qu Yuan drowned himself in 278 BC after being exiled from the Chu court; the races were supposedly started to search for his body. Each June, an international dragon boat race takes place on the Miluo, drawing teams from across China and abroad. The connection to Qu Yuan is celebrated throughout the region, though the historical evidence that the festival began here rather than elsewhere in the Yangtze watershed is contested.
Yueyang is 30 minutes by high-speed train from Changsha and an equally short ride from Wuhan across the Hunan border, making it a natural stop on any journey north-south through central China. Admission to Yueyang Tower costs ¥70; the boat to Junshan Island is an additional ¥80.