Thousands of monkeys that fled in fear as the Three Gorges reservoir began rising in June have returned to their native habitat on one of the Yangtze’s most beautiful tributaries, the Chongqing Evening News (Chongqing wanbao) reports. But the monkeys, which help draw tourists to the region, have come back to a degraded environment.

Monkeys in the Mini Three Gorges [Click on image to enlarge]

About 3,000 rhesus monkeys make their home along the Daning River, which flows through the spectacular Mini (or Lesser) Three Gorges. However, the river is no longer the pristine waterway it used to be. Water quality in the Daning has fallen from an excellent Grade 1 rating to Grade 3 as a result of the filling of the Three Gorges reservoir, the Shanghai-based Wenhui Daily (Wenhui bao) reported on Sept. 15. According to China’s water-quality index, Grade 3 water can be used for irrigation, but is unfit for human consumption.

The monkeys, along with many other creatures living along the river, scattered in all directions when the reservoir was filled three months ago to its initial height of 135 metres above sea level. While passengers on tour boats searched in vain for glimpses of the famous monkeys, workers on shore put out even more food than usual to entice the animals back. The local tourism bureau regularly leaves as much as 1.5 tonnes of grain and corn at fixed spots for the monkeys every week, the Chongqing Evening News said in its Sept. 18 report.

Pollution on the Daning River [Click on image to enlarge]

The monkeys’ return is good news for a tourism industry that is facing much other bad news. The Mini Three Gorges stretch along 40 kilometres of the winding Daning River and are smaller, though some say even more impressive, than the Three Gorges on the Yangtze. Tourism was worth 25 million yuan (more than US$3 million) to Wushan county, or one-third of its revenue, in 2001. "If the local environment is damaged, we will have nothing left," a county official told People’s Daily that year.

Many attractions in the county will be lost forever when the reservoir reaches its final height of 175 metres in 2009. At the entrance of the Mini Three Gorges, for instance, the water will lap just below the roadway of the Dragon Gate Bridge (Longmen qiao), which spans the Daning at its confluence with the Yangtze.

Dragon Gate Bridge [Click on image to enlarge]

But already the Daning River has lost the limpid water for which it has been renowned. In July 2001, People’s Daily quoted a local tourist guide as saying that the Daning "is so clean that many foreign tourists just drink their bottles dry of mineral water and replace it with the river water." It was a view echoed in The Los Angeles Times by correspondent Ching-Ching Ni, who wrote that "unlike the deep and murky Yangtze, which is brown from soil erosion and industrial pollutants, the Daning is shallow and clear. Water from the new dam, however, will shroud it like a dirty blanket."

When Interfax news agency reporter David Stanway travelled in the area this summer with other foreign correspondents, they could already see that "dirty blanket."

"Those among our party who had visited the Lesser Three Gorges before the reservoir was flooded were in agreement that the scenery and the water quality had deteriorated," he wrote. "Dredging boats travel along the Daning River three times a day to clean the waters, but according to the guide, ‘there had been too much flood water recently,’ leading to an increase in the garbage floating on the surface. While migrants, monuments and even entire temples can be relocated, scenery cannot, and this remains one of the irreversible losses of the Three Gorges Dam."

Since the filling of the reservoir, huge belts of pollution can be seen floating on the Yangtze and its tributaries. The debris includes tree branches and other vegetation, Styrofoam food containers, soft-drink bottles, and even animal carcasses.

Algal blooms have also occurred in several sections of the Daning River, a sign of a deteriorating water environment, according to a report in the People’s Yangtze newspaper published by the Changjiang Water Resources Commission.

Weng Lida, a water-quality official with the commission, warned that the situation is likely to become much worse when the reservoir is filled to 175 metres. More severe pollution can be expected in the slower-flowing rivers, which will lose some of their self-purifying capacity.

"Monitoring work on the reservoir should be improved, further studies are needed and effective solutions must be sought to safeguard water quality in the main channel [of the Yangtze] and its tributaries," People’s Yangtze quoted Mr. Weng as saying.