When the Great Dam on the Yangtze River opens in a few months, the city of Yunyang will be largely flooded. 160 of its residents have already begun to evacuate, all the buildings below the flood line are destroyed, the poor and those without connections are forced to stay and deal with the looting and destruction. Only the 1,700-year-old temple is being moved to a safe place, Father
Joseph Kahn
In the photo: Buildings are being demolished in the city of Pengji, not far from Yunyang. A total of 1.13 million people and more than 120 settlements are being evacuated
Anyone who has money, a good job or a friend in the right place has already left the city of Yunyang, which lies on the banks of the Yangtze River. Banks and government offices closed their shutters. The clinic was finally closed last week. The apartments in empty buildings were taken over by squatters. The people left in the city are the poor, the desperate, the unlucky or all three. Each of them is Noah, searching for his box.
In just six months, when the huge "Three Gorges Dam" is activated, the waters of the Yangtze River will rise and flood Yunyang's wharf, then the old boardwalk, then the apartment buildings overlooking the river. The river will reach the main street of the city. Even the poorest will be forced to move to higher ground by then, but many of them still don't know how. "We want to live in a place with flowers and lights, a beautiful place that is not dark all the time," said Jia Shibi, a 43-year-old mother of two who lost her job as a port worker, "We just want to leave."
The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydroelectric project in human history. According to the plan, it is supposed to generate electricity on a scale comparable to that produced by 18 nuclear power plants and help curb the river, which is prone to floods and overflows. But the price involved in building the dam is very high, even beyond the 30 billion dollars invested in building the dam itself. The dam will actually create a sea inside the land and raise the level of the Yangtze along 480 km upstream. This means the displacement of one million and 130 thousand people, more than 120 cities and towns, as well as countless historical sites and buildings.
Yunyang, the capital of the cable, which lies at a low altitude, is the one that will be affected the most - 160 residents are supposed to evacuate at the end of the process. The government provided some of these people with homes in wealthier places, such as Shanghai. Others have already moved about 30 km upstream in New Yunyang. This city boasts apartment buildings clad in bright pink and yellow tiles and a manicured park overlooking the Yangtze from a cliff.
The heaviest burden will be borne by those who remain in what remains of the old city. Even after demolition crews finish blowing up the buildings below the projected new waterline, and even after workers finish removing the 1,700-year-old Zhang Fei Temple's treasures and moving them to a new site, many thousands of people will still live there. Parts of the old city will survive the flood, but its residents say its spirit has already sunk completely underwater. "Emigration from this place has impoverished it," said Bao Yunfu, owner of a bookstore that was empty of customers on at least one recent evening.
Dealing with the people who will lose their homes because of the dam turned out to be in many ways a greater engineering challenge than the dam itself. The government allocated an estimated 10 billion dollars for this task. But since the resettlement of residents began in 1993, these efforts stand in the shadow of corruption and complaints, according to which the government does not always keep its promise to provide jobs in factories or alternative agricultural land for the displaced. However, at least some of those who pass away find that their living conditions have improved considerably, while those left behind seem to have been largely forgotten.
Most of the rest are those who are not on the list of those entitled to "work units", the Communist Party's main channel for distributing benefits and social rewards and maintaining its control over society. These are people who cannot afford to buy houses in the new city, even with the help of the government subsidies. These are farmers, who have lost farms near the river and have nowhere else to go.
Notice boards that look like range targets indicate in red letters the height in meters of the flood that will reach the place - 135, 148.4, 175. Almost everything below 148.4 meters was emptied and thoroughly looted, first by the families and businesses that left and then by the demolition crews, who removed all A trace of human habitation from the bottom of the future water reservoir.
The lower parts of the city look as if they have suffered continuous aerial bombardment. House foundations are now ditches. A sloping passage to the harbor, which is paved with stones, is completely shattered. People wander through the ruins and collect scraps to sell. One group of residents uses an old grain warehouse as a dump. Books, toys, bicycle tires and discarded cardboard boxes fill this six-foot-high warehouse.
Chen Shunqing is one of the collectors of scraps and objects. He left his farm earlier this year because the government declared that he and other farmers, who worked the land on the steep hillsides, could no longer grow agricultural crops. Sand washed from the Yangtze river spill, which is brown in color, accumulates at the base of the new dam and requires constant evacuation. Chen, 48, is trying to earn enough money so that his son can continue to attend school. He fits in the engine of an old motorcycle, which he wants to turn into scrap. When the hammer head fell he used the motor to hammer it back into place.
What used to be the bustling port of Yunyang is now almost never visited by vessels. Five-story boats and ferries, which carry tourists to the site of the three gorges where the dam is built, pass by without stopping. The beach serves as a wharf for private contractors, who repair or dismantle rusty riverboats. Skeletons of ships in various stages of decomposition are resting on rocks. Workers wave gas lanterns with one hand and smoke a cigarette with the other. Jets fly and the smell of sulfur rises in the air.
There is no sign of any supervision. Len Tianguo, a former butcher who runs a ship salvage team, dismissed the need for supervision from above. "We are careful enough", he said, "we don't want to destroy our ships". China's rigid hierarchical social order fell apart. Residents tell of armed robberies and rape. A boat owner told of a man from out of town, who was shot dead after an argument with a taxi driver.
In Yunyang, only a few of the means of supervision and control over the population that are used in China remain. Displaced farmers are invading buildings that will only be flooded in 2007, when the amount of water in the reservoir will reach its peak. Yang Yan, 19, moved to the city from a nearby village with her boyfriend. They live in a three-room apartment with a concrete floor and no lighting. The only decoration in the place is a 2001 calendar left by the departed owners. "It's better than in the village, which is very dark and very cold," she said.
Peasants, day laborers and sufferers are now the only regular diners at Xiang Guimei's noodle shop, which no longer sells noodles. "In the past, bank workers and clerks bought noodle soup," said Xiang as she cooked over coals. "But these types", she said, pointing to the half dozen customers with sooty faces, "they just want cheap food".
The three gorges, those rocks that loom in the mist above the roaring Yangtze River, have served for centuries as a source of inspiration for poets and painters. Recently, they have begun to attract tourists, eager to see their vertical escarpment before the water reservoir reduces its dimensions.
But the river cities have fewer fans. The land is rocky and infertile. It takes at least eight hours by speedboat to reach the nearest major city, and there are no railroads, airports, or major highways nearby.
Yunyang's publication came solely from the ancient temple in honor of a Han Dynasty general, Zhang Fei. The temple was built in the third century to commemorate his victories on the battlefield. Since then it has stood, although it has undergone significant renovations.
The most permanent job in Yunyang is participating in the operation to dismantle the temple. Following complaints that the dam would destroy too many cultural treasures and antiquities, the government vowed to preserve the temple by rebuilding it on higher ground, brick by brick. Local residents have been busy dismantling the temple's stones for months.
One of them is Huang Bing, 21 years old. He takes comfort in the thought that the temple he first visited with his father when he was six years old will be saved. But after a crane recently uprooted Zhang Fei's statue from its altar, Huang and some friends burned incense and set off fireworks in hopes of encouraging the general's spirit to escape the flood. "I don't really believe in Buddhism, but you never know," he said. "Some people say that we can move the stones, but the wind will be left behind."
