Talk:Qarhan Playa

Title
"Qarhan Lake" or "Salt Lake" does seem to be more common in PRC sources like Shanghai Daily and an official sign for the geological park reads "Chaerhan Salt Lake National Mine Park in Gomud, Qnghai". As should be clear from the "Gomud" and "Qnghai", though, those translations aren't particularly well considered and are just a direct calque of the Chinese name.

Zheng, who led the first geological expeditions into the area in the '50s and kept writing as its exploitation took off, uses "playa" and so do most of the other geologists and reliable academic/scholarly sources who discuss the place. It seems much more helpful to use some such phrasing and draw a line under its non-lake status, since (for the last 25,000-odd years) this isn't even occasionally a single lake and misunderstandings lead to claims like this being "China's biggest salt lake" (including here where they even discuss it being a playa) when it's nothing of the sort. — Llywelyn II   14:01, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Origin
Note that various Chinese sources claim it derives from Mongolian meaning "Salt World" (盐的世界) or "Salt Pond" (盐泽) and that's leaked over into English sources (here, here, here). That seems entirely false. The word газар (gazar) might explain that odd "world" translation since its literal sense ("place") is figuratively extended to talk about the world, but (a)most Mongolian constructions with gazar use it as the second element: i.e., if it were a "salt-place", potentially mistranslated "salt-world", the qar should've been the second element of the name. (b)Even if Wiktionary's Mongolian coverage is spotty, in this wonderfully thorough dictionary there's nothing remotely similar to "qar", "han", or "Qarhan" in Mongolian with the sense of "salt", "salt flat", "salt lake", or "salt place". There's хорон (horon) which is vaguely similar (although Chinese q should be transcribing Mongolian ч or ц) but it means "salt" in the sense of "salty language": i.e., "venomous", "unpleasant", "acid", etc.

Instead, just like Qaidam gets called Mongolian but is actually Tibetan, that looks like what's going on here. The Tibetan tshwa ("salt") got transcribed into Mongolian as ца... which got transcribed by Chinese romanizers as qa... (pinyin q is a relative of ch, which is English's spelling of phonetic /ts/). If it had been transliterated directly from Tibetan, ZWPY would've turned tshwa... into ca... instead. [Edit: every Chinese source I can find only glosses it as Mongolian in reference to salt, never with any Mongolian text. The closest Tibetan equivalent I can find is ་་ or ་་། (tschwa thang), where the second word means "plain" or "plains"—e.g., salt flat. Google doesn't offer Tibetan translation, though, so hard to check if any of the pages using it might reference Qarhan.] — Llywelyn II   16:26, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Ok, the fine people of StackExchange found the exact Qing-era glossary that first standardized the area's placenames. 察尔汗 is a variant of the original 察罕, which was a transcription of the Mongol word for "white". Apparently, though, the full name would've been something longer—possibly 察罕鄂博, 察罕哈達, 察罕托輝烏魯, or 察罕托羅海—meaning "white... something" before the Chinese decided the local name was too damned long and cut it down to the first word. Anyone with better Chinese and/or Mongolian able to figure out which one and what the original idea was? — Llywelyn II   16:07, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

This page from a nearby geological park finally glosses the name fairly correctly into Chinese as 白...茫茫的世界 ("white... vast world"), with the "world" presumably being a mistaken/intentionally-overpoetic sense of the Mongolian word mentioned above. — Llywelyn II   21:10, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Qarhan Lake
...should apparently only refer to this playa. I've finally tracked down all the current variant spellings and names of the playa's lakes and the only one of them that ever gets mistakenly called 'Qarhan Lake' is Dabusun itself. The previous reference from Garrett (who claims there's a 'Qarhan Lake', 'E. Qarhan Lake', and 'W. Qarhan Lake') apparently comes from his having confused it with Taijinar or misunderstood a Chinese author, who was presumably badly translated into English and meant either the Chaerhan Yanhu (the whole playa) or the Qarhan Subbasin, which has the smaller lakes of Tuanjie and Xiezuo. — Llywelyn II   15:05, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Potassium reserve
The geologists currently being cited seem more reliable than this Shanghai Daily article, but it is more recent and uses a different number for the playa's potassium reserves. It's worth noting, though, that the geologist's "360 million metric tons" is estimated mass of actual potassium oxide whereas the "274 million tons" in the article seems to be theoretical amounts of extractable pure potassium, which means the amounts might be roughly comparable. (K₂O should lose around a fifth of its mass if you took out the oxygen, neh?) — Llywelyn II   14:01, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Meanwhile, Du & al. give 194 million metric tons, but are talking about KCl instead of K or K₂O... — Llywelyn II   13:04, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Rivers
Yu & al. say there are 6 permanent and 7 intermittent streams that contribute to the basin but don't specify what they are. Du & al. report that there's also the Zaohuo and Halawusu Rivers. The former flows into the southwest corner below Suli Lake but apparently doesn't form a lake itself. This Chinese map calls it the Xiao or Little Zaohuo (小灶火河); it also gives separate names to branches of the Golmud. The latter isn't explained. They also discuss something called "Shell Bar" as if it were a lake. — Llywelyn II   13:00, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Mandarin pronunciation
The Mandarin pronunciation given on Wiktionary is different from the one we give here. Wiktionary or Wikipedia (or both) are in error or missing information. Geographyinitiative (talk) 05:27, 21 October 2019 (UTC)