Gallery Two: Three Gorges Migrants Through the Lens of Li Feng
The journey continues.
Follow history in the making as we reenter the lives of Three Gorges migrants from 2004 to 2010 through the lens of one of China’s greatest photographers. In this series, Li Feng travels alongside the people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam and the radical changes that its creation wrought.
On June 20, 2004, the tourist pier was empty at the entrance to the Lesser Three Gorges in Wushan. Not a single tourist showed up. In the past, this would have been the peak season for local tourism, but as the water level rose to about 140 metres, the classic attractions of the Lesser Three Gorges were flooded and tourists stopped coming to visit at this point.
On July 9, 2004, the Three Gorges Project officially opened its shiplock to traffic. Wang Jinxi, a 70-year-old migrant, was very happy to bear witness to the event and to attend the opening ceremony for this phase of the project. Located on the dam site of the Three Gorges, his old home was flooded and his family became one of the first groups of people moved to make way for the enormous undertaking.
On August 18, 2004, 881 migrants from Fengjie County departed for Jiangxi Province. They were the last batch of migrants to leave the Three Gorges Reservoir area for other provinces. By that time, a total of 165,000 migrants had been moved to make way for the reservoir.
In April 2005, Li Wenjun would soon be relocated from Guilin Village in Zigui County. He made a small coffin to keep the remains of his deceased loved ones safe. He was planning to bring the small coffin with him when he and his family had to leave. A little later in that same year, the reservoir would be impounded and the water level would reach 156 metres.
In September 2007, the water level of the Three Gorges Reservoir reached 156 metres during the second phase of impoundment. The old pier in Badong County was completely submerged, but the migrants who went to the new county town to visit the market there were still not accustomed to this. They had to disembark from their boats and walk through the water. During this period in time, landslides occurred in some areas of the Three Gorges Reservoir area.
A large area of "pollutants" appeared on the Xiangxi River, a tributary of the Yangtze. The was mainly due to slow water movement caused by the reservoir impoundment in October 2008.
Three migrant families moved to new homes via a ferry near Huoyanshi in Badong County. Several other passengers were also on board on this day, September 25, 2009.
There were a large number of small coal mines in the Three Gorges Reservoir area, especially in Badong, Wushan, Fengjie, Wuxi and Yunyang counties. Many of these coal mines would be submerged by the rising water with the impoundment of the reservoir. To protect the environment, local governments decided to shut down all of the small coal mines. Migrants were reluctant to do so because they were one of their major sources of income. As this photograph shows, even in July 2010, a group of migrants were still working in local coal mines in Qingshi Township, of Badong County, in Hubei Province. But according to the government, the task of relocating more than one-million migrants in the Three Gorges Reservoir area had already been completed by early 2010.
On October 2, 2010, Li Wenling took her twin sons (aged one) and her 5-year-old daughter back to Daxi Town by boat. Six years ago, together with other migrants, she moved far away to Jiangxi Province, where her daughter and sons were born. She returned to Daxi Town to show them to their grandparents.
Two boys take pictures on the flooded ruins of the old county town of Zigui in 2010.