Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges

Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges

by Deirdre Chetham Palgrave

Macmillan, $150

There has been much written in the western media - most of it negative - about the impact the new Three Gorges Dam will have on the surrounding areas in Sichuan and Hubei provinces. As many other books and articles have reported, 13 cities, 140 towns, 1,351 villages, 657 factories, about 1,300 archaeological sites and 629sqkm in China's central-west region will be flooded by the time the US$24.6 billion project is finished in 2009.

Before the Deluge is different from many other books on the subject because it is not a political or environmental study, nor is it a diatribe on the reasons why the Chinese government should not proceed with this project. Instead, Chetham seems to have the same view as many local residents - that the dam is part of inevitable change - and writes a well-balanced and sometimes touching elegy about the communities and cultures destined to be destroyed.

The best parts of the book are the author's personal anecdotes and her descriptions of the history and daily lives of some of the 1.2 million people who will be relocated when their homes are flooded. Chetham first visited the area in 1983 when she was working on a cruise ship that travelled between Shanghai and Chongqing (formerly Chungking), a city not far from where the dam is being built. After two decades of visits, she developed an intimate understanding of this mostly poor, isolated region.

There's charming Shibao Block's 18th-century pagoda, ancient Fengjie's old fortune-teller and sleazy Wushan's 64 'hair salons' decorated with huge photos of naked Caucasian women, which the locals tell the author, as a compliment, look like her. To create a well-rounded history of the area, Chetham quotes everything, from old Chinese poems to diaries kept by 19th-century traders and missionaries.