The weight of Yangtze water

Some 1.4 million people have been relocated as part of the Three Gorges Dam project, which has been undertaken in an effort to tame the treacherous Yangtze River, writes Fintan O'Toole in Hubei

The boat chugs past a sloping field that used to be part of a small headland jutting out into the Yangtze River, but is now a little island in its midst. The murky waters, brown from all the mud washed into them by the rains falling on deforested lands, lap at the edges of the field, and the boat's wake ripples up to the tiled roof of a small house that the river has now claimed for its own.

A cluster of little cabins sits at the high end of the field, between some ancient-looking terraces and a copse of tall trees. One of them is a simple lean-to, with its straight side facing the river. An old woman sits on a low, small stool outside the door, washing vegetables in a basin. She looks impassively at the passing boat, for all the world as if nothing much is going on here. The wall of her house is painted white and on it, in big red strokes, are three ascending lines. Above the lines is written "175M". The M stands for metres. This is the height above sea-level the river will reach in 2008, when the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world and a potent symbol of Chinese modernity, is completed. The little island, with its remaining houses, trees and crops, will be submerged.

The Homeward-Looking Tower stands on the edge of a cliff on the Minshan mountain range, a few hundred metres above what used to be the town of Fengdu. It is part of an old Buddhist monastery, known as Ghost City, dedicated to the King of the Underworld and filled with statues of demons and lurid images of people being tortured and tormented. The temple was the border between earth and hell. When a person died and his soul was bound for hell, it came here first. Since the spirit was still alive, the King of the Underworld issued a decree permitting the hell-bound souls to mount the Homeward-Looking Tower, take a last look at the earth, and weep. As they cried, the souls would expire. The spirit would be dead and the journey to hell could begin.

Looking down from the tower now, you can actually see glimpses of the underworld. A long slab of rutted concrete juts out into the great river's cloudy waters and at first you imagine it must be a jetty. But it is in fact the roof of some big building, a warehouse, perhaps, or a factory. You can tell because, just a few metres downstream, the roofs of two small redbrick houses also pop up over the surface of the river, keeping their heads above the rising water that will soon drown them.

THESE ARE THE last traces of Fengdu, taking their final look at the earth. As the Three Gorges Dam pushes the river level upwards, they too will disappear forever. The citizens of New Fengdu, the huddle of tower blocks on the far bank where most of the population of the old town has been relocated, will no longer have these relics to remind them of their former home.

The day before I set out on a 650km journey along the river from Chongqing to Yichang - the stretch that is being turned essentially from a river to a lake - the water, now subject to the dam's control, had been allowed to reach its highest level so far, rising from 135m to 156m (it will get to 175m in 2008). That same day, the strongest earthquake to hit Hubei province, where the dam is located, in the last 20 years damaged thousands of houses in the region. Its aftershocks were still being felt as the boat chugged through the swelling waters. It was hard to tell their tremors from the steady throb of the engines and the occasional lurches of the boat through the water. But their existence underlined one of the questions raised by critics of the Three Gorges project. Dam reservoirs are known to induce earthquakes, and the Three Gorges was built near two major fault lines. The project's leaders have always maintained that the dam is built to withstand even the mightiest of shocks. No damage was done this time, but the nagging questions have returned.

Those questions go far beyond the rational. Talk to people in Chongqing and they will tell you that the hotter, drier summer - with temperatures of up to 43 degrees - that they endured this year was caused by the dam, which is 600km away. The claim makes little sense: whatever climatic effects the dam has would be small and local. But it is nonetheless revealing. The Three Gorges Project is so large, its interference with nature, with the landscape, with society, even with history, so profound that it triggers an instinctive belief that there must be a reckoning to pay. The dam seems like an act of hubris, and such pride must be followed by a fall.

In the 1950s, after swimming in the Yangtze, Mao Zedong wrote a poem that ended with the lines: Great plans are afoot;/ A bridge will fly to span the north and south,/ Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare;/ Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west/ Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges./ The mountain goddess, if she is still there,/ Will marvel at a world so changed.

Mao was thinking of the first bridge across the Yangtze, which was then under construction, but mostly of the dream of building a mighty dam at the end of the Three Gorges, the series of spectacular ravines bounded by sheer cliffs and overlooked by jagged peaks, where the river seems to force its way imperiously through solid rock. The Goddess Mountain to which he referred is one of the most spectacular of the peaks that loom above the gorges. The implication that whoever could overcome a goddess must be a god may not have been consciously intended, but it is certainly there. There is a macho swagger to the Three Gorges Project, a tendency to imagine the river as a wild woman and the dam as a symbol of virility. In the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, the introduction to the exhibition actually says that it "presents a masculine Three Gorges: the Great Three Gorges Project".

In a sense, though, the great river has been slowly brought to heel, even without the dam's intervention. It is hard, moving through the Yangtze's powerful currents and feeling the mighty pulse of its heady, seemingly endless flow, to remember how fragile the great river really is. But the warning signs are unmistakable. About 1.5 billion tons of sewage flows into the river each year. Last month, the Yangtze estuary was declared by the United Nations Environment Programme to be a "dead zone" - an area where algal blooms nourished by pollutants have so badly reduced the oxygen supply that no marine life can survive. This month, a leading scientist with the Yangtze Valley Water Resources Protection Bureau reported that the lakes that dot the river have shrunk by more than a third since 1949 because of land reclamation, silting and environmental degradation. The area lost is about 8,000sq km.

Even the river's wildness is not entirely of its own making. Controlling the Yangtze's summer floods, which have caused death, misery and starvation over many centuries, is, according to Yuan Lei of the Three Gorges Project Corporation, the main reason for the dam's existence. The devastation is unquestionable: 145,000 people killed in 1931, 142,000 in 1935, 5,600 in 1949, 33,000 in 1954, 1,520 in 1998. Vast areas of China's food basket have been inundated, causing immense suffering. But the frequency and intensity of the floods has increased rapidly in the 20th century because of development and deforestation.

THERE ARE SIMPLER reasons for fearing the river. Dan Guo Jun has a grudge against the Yangtze. In 1974, it took his father, a riverboat sailor, who drowned in an accident in the treacherous rapids of the Three Gorges. By way of compensation, the company that owned the boat gave Dan Guo Jun, then 16, a job, and he has been sailing up and down the river ever since. In 1990, he became the captain of a ferry sailing between Chongqing and Shanghai. Now, he captains cruise ships that take passengers between Chongqing and the Three Gorges Dam. His journeys on the Yangtze, he reckons, now total more than a million kilometres. He knows the river's moods, its beauties and its treacheries, as well as anyone.

"The Yangtze," he says, "used to be the most dangerous major navigable river in the world. In summer, the river would be high, and the currents very strong. Passing through the Three Gorges, you were trying to negotiate your way through a series of rapids. But in winter, the water would get very shallow, and the rocks underneath would become a major problem. The area in which you could pass safely was very narrow. If you met a ship coming in the other direction, it was very difficult to pass." Though his own experience and knowledge of the river allowed him to avoid accidents, he says he saw many.

From his pragmatic perspective, in which the lives of sailors and passengers are the main consideration, the Three Gorges Project is entirely welcome. "The water is getting deeper, so the rocks are not so much of a problem in winter. And the flow is slower, so you don't have to deal with rapids in the summer months. The river is wider, so it's easier for ships to pass each other safely." He dismisses the idea that the dam has affected the climate and doesn't believe that pollution has become any worse.

As for the disappearance of settlements and the changed landscapes along the river, he is relentlessly unsentimental. "Old scenes disappear," he shrugs. "New scenes appear." The town of Wushan, which is now submerged, was, he says, "not beautiful". The landscape, he feels, is altered only slightly. "Before, you looked up at the peaks from a river which was 70m above sea level. Now, you look up from 150m above sea level. They still look very grand, very awe-inspiring." This is certainly true: the Three Gorges retain an outlandish, elemental beauty, their fearful scale absorbing the increased water levels with some ease.

It is the people who inhabited this landscape who have suffered most. The good reasons for building the dam - flood control, navigation, the generation of 85 billion kilowatt-hours of relatively clean electricity a year - would seem better if the people affected were seen as more than another engineering problem to be overcome. Though the plan involved shifting 1.13 million people from their homes, making it the largest single resettlement project undertaken, it has already exceeded this mind-boggling number. The population to be moved has now been revised upwards to 1.4 million.

Moving along the river, it is easy to see why: the land allocated for resettlement above the new high-water level is simply not able to absorb its new population. You can see new fields eked out from what used to be high promontories above the river bank. Many of them look rough and sparse. One local told me that "the land was so poor that the government had to give each farmer 4,500 yuan (€450) to buy fertiliser. But if they have to keep spending that much, it's uneconomic to farm there." The boat sails blithely over Wushan, the town's streets and houses now occupied only by fish. New Wushan, its ranks of multi-storey apartment blocks perched on terraces gouged into the hills, rises on the shore.

Speaking out about the resettlement programme is not easy (the activist Fu Xiancai was paralysed in an attack last June after he gave an interview to a German TV crew complaining about inadequate compensation). But one local woman told me many people were out of pocket after their move from the old town to the new one. "The apartments in the town are bigger than in the old one," she said, "and many people are very happy to have them. But the compensation was just 400 yuan (€40) per square metre, and the new apartments cost twice that. If you had a big house before, or if you had savings, you could afford a new place. But many poor people didn't have enough money, so they're now homeless or renting accommodation." One study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, showed "a continuous decline in household income" for both resettled migrants and their host populations in a region that was already poor.

AS THE BOAT moves through the last gorge before the dam, we pass through Zigui, the area that was home to the legendary poet Qu Yuan in the third century BC. Qu Yuan is known to every Chinese person because his death is commemorated in the Dragon Boat Festival, as important in Chinese culture as Christmas is the West, when people give each other packages of flavoured rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. The presents recall the rice that local people threw into the river to stop the fish from eating Qu Yuan's body when, in a fit of despair at the ways of power, he threw himself into the Yangtze and drowned.

Now the water is rising inexorably over Zigui, its people gone. Qu Yuan's memorial temple has been dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere.

The drowned man's home is itself being drowned.