West Dabusun Lake
ephemeral salt lake in the Qarhan Playa, Qinghai, China
West Dabusun or Dabuxun Lake is an ephemeral lake northwest of Golmud in the Haixi Prefecture of Qinghai Province in northwestern China. Comprising a basin in the Qarhan Playa, it fills when meltwater floods the Golmud River, causing it to spill into subsidiary channels west of the main course to Dabusun Lake. Like the other lakes of the surrounding Qaidam Basin, it is extremely saline.
Name
Dabusun or Dabsan is a romanization of a Mongolian name meaning "Salt Lake". The adjective "west" distinguishes it from nearby Dabusun Lake. Dabuxun is the pinyin romanization of the Mandarin pronunciation of the same name's transcription into characters. Xi Dabsan or Xidabuxun are the same names, prefixed with the Chinese word for "West".
Geography
West Dabusun Lake lies in the Dabusun subbasin in the central Qarhan Playa in the southeastern corner of the Qaidam Basin at an elevation of 2,675 m (8,776 ft). Although sometimes listed as perennial, it is an ephemeral saline lake fed by the "Yuejin River" (t 躍進河, s 跃进河, Yuèjìn Hé), a subsidiary western channel of the Golmud that periodically fill with meltwater. It usually reaches a size of about 30 km2 (12 sq mi).
“West Dabusun Lake” enters the record as ephemeral salt lake in the Qarhan Playa, Qinghai, China. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what West, Dabusun and Lake can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16936451. Authority coordinates are 37.083, 94.789. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Dabusun Lake” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.