The Sunday Times
January 12, 2006

In the greatest peacetime ransacking in living memory, a horde of scavengers has fallen upon towns and villages that will vanish under water after the gargantuan Three Gorges dam begins to stem the Yangtze River’s flow next year.

Yunyang: As the Yangtze River ferryboat drew in, Yunyang looked at first sight like the bombed-out Chinese cities in fuzzy newsreels of the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s. Then, through grey sheets of rain, dozens of spectral figures prowling the ruins resolved themselves into men and women hammering and clawing at every building they could reach. The scale was that of an epic movie set. The stench of a city dying after more than 1,000 years of human habitation was epic, too. Up and down a 260-mile stretch of the Yangtze, the greatest peacetime ransacking in living memory is under way. A horde of scavengers has fallen upon towns and villages that will vanish under up to 450ft water after China’s gargantuan Three Gorges dam begins to stem the river’s flow next year. The dam, which will swallow up at least ¬£17 billion, will produce as much electricity as 18 standard nuclear plants. It is intended once and for all to subdue the annual floodwaters of the Yangtze, which killed more than a quarter of a million Chinese people during the 20th century. Gleaming ranks of new apartment buildings crown the hilltops above the eventual waterline to house those migrants lucky enough to claim a place in them. The price of this achievement is daunting, however. When the waters rise, 129 towns and cities will be submerged, along with a swathe of China’s most fertile farmland. More than 7,000 factories have been told to shut down. The Communist party has ordered 1.1m people to leave their homes. The doomed towns and villages recite a litany of Chinese history and Yunyang will do as well as any of them to tell its last chapter. At first, it was the absence of the usual noise and bustle of a port that seemed strange. A few food stalls clung to the mighty stone steps that ascend, in every Yangtze town of significance, from the quayside to the temples and markets above.