The book of the dead

Wei Dongying spreads a sheaf of handwritten papers across the living room floor of her simple home and sits back patiently in her chair as we read through them, page by page. These testimonies - some neat and concise, others brief and angry, others barely more than a scrawl - amount to an extraordinary chronicle of human suffering: a dossier of despair that charts the slow, agonising death of Wei's once-thriving village.

For more than a decade, the 46-year-old has been tracking the abnormally high cancer rates in Wuli village, Zhejiang province, by collecting poignant written statements from the dying and from the shattered, grieving families they leave behind.

"I really feel as if my whole body is disintegrating," one victim, a close neighbour, wrote. "I just wish my village could go back to the way it was when I was young. I want to taste fresh water and breathe fresh air again."

Months after committing his thoughts to paper, Wang Jiangping, 49, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He died in July last year.

Mr Cao, whose young wife died of breast cancer, vented his anger in writing: "It's all because of the factories. So many people are dying since the factories arrived. No one is listening. Why doesn't someone stop this?"

A fisherman living in the village wrote: "These chemical factories dump their waste water directly into the river. The water used to be clear but now it's murky and it stinks. There used to be so many fish and so many shrimp. Now, everything has died. The pollution is too much. It is affecting all of us and there is nothing we can do about it. We have nowhere to go and no one will help."

Wuli is one of the so-called "cancer villages", recognised at last by Beijing this year as having unusually high rates of the disease because of unregulated industrial development. That recognition came after years of campaigning by environmental groups and individual campaigners such as Wei.