A visitor to Changsha Xiangjiang Ocean Kingdom in China’s Hunan province was injured on the head and face during a paid aquarium dive. According to the available media reports, the incident happened on 15 May 2026 but became more widely public only in mid-June.
Sohu/Upstream News reported that an Ocean Kingdom employee confirmed on 15 June that a visitor had been bitten by a shark. The affected diving project was no longer open, and the venue was communicating with the injured visitor.
Bite shortly after descending
The visitor, identified in reports only by the surname Bao, said he had paid 480 yuan for the Blue Hole Adventure project. On site, he said, the offer had been presented as suitable even for children. Bao said he had not known before entering the water that sharks were in the tank.
According to his account, he had been in the water only a few seconds and was about one to two meters below the surface when a roughly three-meter sand tiger shark approached and bit him. Bao said the actual contact lasted only about 10 to 20 seconds.
JiuPai News reported that Bao described the biting shark as a sand tiger shark. According to information he said he received from the venue, he had been in the shark’s swimming area during the incident.
Head and facial injuries
The fuller report by Jiemu News described seven deeper facial wounds and two wounds on the head. Medical documents seen by the media described multiple animal bites from a shark, and Bao was reportedly advised to rest for three months.
Bao said the impact initially felt stronger than the pain. After the bite, he signaled that he wanted to surface. In his account, staff did not immediately recognize the danger and first asked whether he wanted to continue the dive.
Beijing News also summarized the case on 15 June as a head and facial injury during a dive at Changsha Xiangjiang Ocean Kingdom. According to that report, compensation questions between Bao and the venue had not yet been settled.
Project reportedly closed
Several Chinese media outlets reported that the affected diving project had since been closed or was in a renovation and improvement phase. Sohu/Upstream News also wrote that Bao criticized the venue for initially continuing to offer the dive after the incident.
The venue said, according to the reports, that this was the only known case of its kind there so far. When asked about other underwater programs in which employees perform in tanks with sharks, Ocean Kingdom said visitors watch those shows from outside the tank.
Not a classic open-water case
The location is decisive for understanding the case: this did not happen at a beach, while surfing, or during a natural ocean dive, but inside an artificial aquarium tank. It is therefore closer to a safety and supervision incident in a commercial animal facility than to a typical shark encounter in open water.
The injury was nevertheless real and serious. Offers that bring visitors into immediate proximity to large sharks need especially clear risk information, separation, supervision and emergency response, more so than a normal aquarium show behind glass.
The park is listed by Trip.com as a large ocean-park attraction in Changsha; the location is in the Tongxi Road area of Yuelu District. The map used here is oriented to the nearby Tongxi Metro Station, not to an officially published accident coordinate.
The case should therefore be classified cautiously: it was a nonfatal aquarium-diving accident with a reported sand tiger shark, not a typical encounter in the open sea. A final official assessment or public investigation result was not available at the time of the reports.
