The village's name is Shangxin; translated into English it means 'esteemed happiness'. However, because of despair and a lack of water, residents have given it another name - 'broken heart'. Shangxin, once a thriving village in corn and wheat-growing country 60km west of Shandong's provincial capital Jinan, is now a ghost town, the result of a nine-year drought. The drought, reportedly one of the worst in the past century, forced the young to seek work in the cities, halving the village's population to 200. The old are left to contemplate their fate in a barren land and survive only on the money being sent home by younger relatives who have found jobs in the cities. Farmer 'Grandma' Liu lives in despair. 'I can't grow anything here. Look how bad my corn is,' she says, holding a shrivelled 15cm corn cob. 'When there was water, I could grow good corn and sell each cob and earn 200 yuan [HK$188] a month.' Now, the kindness of relatives is Ms Liu's only means of survival. Her predicament is sadly all too common as the northern part of the nation faces a water crisis. About 400 northern cities are facing chronic water shortages, with many of their per capita water supplies either already below, or close to dropping below, the international danger benchmark of 1,700 cubic metres. The hardest-hit regions are in Shandong. Located north of the Yellow River, which is known as the Yellow-Huai-Hai River basin, its per capita water supply is only one-fifth of the national average. This year's drought left Shandong's 6.25 million-plus people without adequate water supplies and caused economic losses of more than 10 billion yuan. 'There is no water here. It has all dried up!' says Liu Zhonglin, a middle-school teacher in nearby Pingyin city who grew up in Shangxin. He points to an empty 16-metre-high dam, its bed now dry just like the nearby wells. 'I used to swim here when I was a child. It was filled to the top and full of fish and shrimp,' Mr Liu says. He says the dam started to dry up in the late 1980s as a result of changing climate patterns and massive deforestation in the nearby mountains. When the dam dried up, villagers dug more wells and pumped water. With overuse and little rain, the wells and aquifers - permeable rocks which can contain or transmit groundwater - also dried up. A depleted underground water table caused an area of the village to sink. Apart from rainwater, the only other source of water the village has is a piped supply pumped from 20km away. But at a cost of three yuan a cubic metre, villagers can only afford to use the bare minimum necessary for survival. Planners of the vast South-North Water Transfer Project say its purpose is to help stricken communities survive and develop. The Ministry of Water Resources' project director, Zhang Guoliang, says the project's water will boost the region's social development. 'This project will be an effective measure to solve the water shortage problem' he says. He says when the project's middle and eastern routes were completed, the water will bring more than 55 billion yuan in direct economic benefits. Just 30km away from Shangxin, workers are digging canals in the Pingyin section of the project's eastern route. A map at the project's work station pictures canals full of water passing through lush green pastures. The eastern route, due to be completed by 2007, is designed to carry 8.9 billion cubic metres of water a year from the Yangtze River in southern Jiangsu province to Shandong's Dongping Lake south of Jinan City. The water will then be diverted to two secondary canal systems that will feed the province's major urban areas. The urban areas' freed up water supply will then go to the rural regions. It is uncertain whether villages such as Shangxin will receive any water. With central and local governments funding the canal project, water-users, including rural residents, will be required to meet some of the infrastructure and purification costs. Water fees are only expected to increase by up to three yuan per cubic metre for urban users while poor rural areas will be subsidised, according to the government. But officials have admitted some places will not get water. 'If the costs are too big, particularly in remote rural villages, we will have to look at other methods,' Mr Zhang says. With Shangxin's residents having little or no income, the village's fate rests on whether the government gives it access to a subsidised water supply. If it does not get water, the village will continue to fade away. 'Everybody in the village who could leave has left,' schoolteacher Mr Liu says. 'Without water, there is nothing here for us.' Tomorrow: the water project is an engineer's life work