Temple move highlights major challenges as waters rise behind Three Gorges Dam

A few hours downriver from Chongqing , the newly relocated village of Longan is famed as the new home of a 1,700-year-old temple dedicated to warrior Zhang Fei of the Three Kingdoms period.

At a cost of 40 million yuan (HK$45.4 million), the temple was moved stone by stone from a site swallowed by the Three Gorges' Dam reservoir and is one of the few historical treasures saved.

Mainland authorities point to the relocation as part of the engineering triumph of the dam, but the villagers say they have lost fertile land to the rebuilt temple and the reservoir over the past decade, without adequate compensation. And now they suffer from another problem inherent in big dams: landslides.

'We never had serious landslides before the Zhang Fei Temple was moved here,' said resident He Tianfu , 75. 'But now it's getting worse despite repair work.'

The dam has been touted as the country's top prestige project of the past three decades. With 22,500 megawatts of generating capacity, ability to tame the flood-prone Yangtze, and a lake of more than 1,000 sq km, the benefits of the 185-metre-tall concrete dam seem all too obvious.

But the project - which took decades to propose, two weeks to get approval from the country's rubber-stamp parliament, and more than 14 years and tens of billions of dollars to build - has been a magnet for controversy from its outset.

Mainland media have repeatedly reported on the temple's fate since the reservoir began filling in 2003. It was forced to close after a landslide hit the area in summer last year, highlighting one of the most widespread problems in the dam's catchment.