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Lake Biwa
Japan’s largest and oldest lake, with some sixty species found nowhere else.
On the mapShiga
Six hundred and seventy square kilometres, a depth of a hundred and four metres, and a history long enough for evolution to produce endemics: Lake Biwa is one of the planet’s twenty or so ancient lakes, alongside Baikal and Tanganyika. Its shape recalls the biwa, the Japanese lute, hence the name. A canal dug in 1890 still carries its water to Kyoto. The Eight Views of Ōmi, codified in the seventeenth century after the Chinese Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, made the lake a standard subject of woodblock prints.
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