Holdouts Before the Deluge

The old house with its spacious courtyard and pointy rooftop used to be the nicest in town. Three centuries of wear and tear have turned it into a dilapidated shanty, like all the other houses in this dying river village.

Yet its stature has never diminished in the eyes of the Wen family. Twelve generations of Wen children were born there, raised there, married there and expected to die there. The house is the family. The family is the house.

But not for much longer.

The deluge is coming.

When the world’s largest hydroelectric project is completed in China’s legendary Three Gorges area, it will be a triumph of the future over the past.

The $25-billion Sanxia Dam promises to power China’s economic boom and tame the Yangtze River, which has both fed and flooded the people who call it the cradle of their civilization. But the dam will also force more than a million people from their ancestral homes, wash away thousands of towns and villages, turn countless historic relics into mere pebbles and bury millenniums of memories in a giant watery grave.

The government spins this extraordinary sacrifice into a simple slogan: “Forsake the small home. Support the big home.” Pressure is mounting to relocate families as Beijing races to meet a 2003 deadline, when the filling of a 1.4-mile-long reservoir is to begin. Already, more than 260,000 residents have been uprooted. This year, 50,000 more will have to go.

For the Wens, the uprooting is particularly bittersweet: Their home will be saved from the great flood, but they will never be allowed to live in it again.

Instead, officials have told the family, the house will be taken apart brick by brick--and relocated to a nearby touristattraction.

The government plans to build a kind of cultural theme park with historical artifacts from Dachang, including a few old homes such as the Wens’ and the ancient city wall that once embraced the town. Local officials want to capture some of the tourist dollars that the stunning scenery of the Three Gorges on the Yangtze is bringing into the region.

The Wens could come back and see their old home again, if they pay the price of admission.

Despite the house’s landmark status, the government will only give the Wens roughly the same amount of compensation as it would any other family of eight living in broken-down shacks on Dachang’s Liberation Street. After subtracting mandatory moving expenses, that means about $10,000.

“This is my home,” Wen Guanglin, the family’s introverted 61-year-old patriarch, said in a rare outburst as he sat shirtless in the scorching heat. “If that’s all the money they will give us, I don’t want their money. I’m staying in this house, and I’m going wherever the house goes.”

The authorities don’t see what the fuss is all about. They claim that residents such as the Wens are under the false impression that they will get rich from the resettlement drive. That’s not going to happen.

“The house does not belong to them anymore,” said a Communist Party cadre in the town’s immigration office who only gave his surname, Li. “It belongs to the country.”

Built by an ancestor, a powerful county governor 300 years ago, the Wen family compound is one of the best local examples of late Ming and early Qing dynasty architecture.

When the Wen family home was built, Dachang was a bustling trading post perched on the edge of the Daning, a tributary of the Yangtze. The town depended on the river for everything.

Even now, the only way to get into and out of Dachang is by boat. Unlike the deep and murky Yangtze, which is brown from soil erosion and industrial pollutants, the Daning is shallow and clear. Water from the new dam, however, will shroud it like a dirty blanket.

Patriarch Wen lives out his days dreading the breakup of his family. His older son and two granddaughters will ship out this month. They will head to government-assigned homes in Guangdong, about 600 miles away. His younger son and grandson will most likely leave for a different part of the country next year.

It’s as if the ancestors knew that it would come to this. The youngest and probably the last Wen descendant to be born in the house and given a name according to his birth order is 4-year-old Yuanhang. It means Journey Far.

The Wen family is sadly familiar with the consequences of grand government policies.

During the famine that ravaged China in the early 1960s after Mao Tse-tung’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” Wen Guanglin’s parents and three younger brothers all starved to death. Then, around the time of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, members of the people’s commune that ran every aspect of life took over the house.

They smashed the intricately carved wooden windows and put up rusty steel bars. They hacked off the timber stairwell and chopped it into firewood. They painted revolutionary slogans on the large open kitchen wall. Forty years later, faded red characters still scream, “Long Live the Central Party Line.”

Old Wen rebuilt his life from scratch, pressing and selling tofu to raise his family. His two sons now wake up before dawn to hawk the soft bean curd that yields them about $3 a day.

Their historic home already brings in a few tourists on their way to rafting trips in the so-called Mini Three Gorges nearby. Each visitor pays about 60 cents to look around the skeletal remains of what was once a splendid mansion with a dozen rooms and a huge parlor with a high ceiling.

Very few of the original furnishings remain. The wooden tub where the governor used to bathe is still there. But now it’s used as a huge garbage can. The hand-carved window in the bedroom where Wen repaired with his bride on their wedding night is still there. Now, however, the room is used for storage.

To live somewhere else is a terrifying thought for the Wens. The same anxiety is brewing all around town. Every day, angry neighbors spill into the street as they haggle with cadres parroting the party line.

The residents’ main complaint is money. They say that, out of the nearly $4,000 the state promises each displaced person, only about $1,000 will reach their pockets. The rest goes to random charges ranging from down payments on their new farmhouses to various moving expenses, including train, boat and bus tickets, even a stipend for the cadres assigned to escort them to their new homes.

The lack of accountability and too many stories of corruption and embezzlement have eroded their confidence that they will ever get a fair shake.

“Nobody trusts the government anymore. They don’t keep their word,” said Ma Qun, who makes a living operating a motorboat in and out of Dachang. He was tapped to leave for nearby Hubei province last year. He and his neighbors were told that in the first few years after they moved, they’d be exempt from local farm taxes. It wasn’t so when they got to Hubei.

So he has been sneaking back into town to make a few more runs on his boat, which took him and his brother five years to pay off. When the river rises, the shallow-water vessel will become scrap metal. The government has no plans to compensate the brothers for the loss.

Stories like theirs abound.

Farmer Tan Tianhua is the only able-bodied member of his family. His mother cannot walk, and his son cannot hear or speak. Tan says he’d rather die here than move to a strange place.

So he, like many of the terrified villagers, runs to the hills and hides in caves whenever the immigration officials come. Tan was hiding in a family grave overlooking his picturesque village when the cadres came. They threatened to handcuff his wife if she refused to accede to government terms. She submitted, and the family is scheduled to move this summer.

“I cannot live like this,” a despondent Tan said as he squatted next to the deep grave, which can hide up to eight farmers.

Chen Zuman’s 62-year-old mother also was forced to register her family for relocation. Afterward, she was so overcome with guilt that she committed suicide by drinking rat poison.

Local officials seem impervious to the suffering.

“If they want to go, they sign up,” said Li, the cadre. “If they don’t want to go, we work to convince them until they agree to go.”

Clearly, there is no turning back. As the end nears, the town’s elders are making the most of their daily rituals. For as long as they can, they will stroll along Liberation Street, stopping off at the Wen family compound, where there is always a small crowd venting about the imminent move. The elder Wen will listen from his bamboo stool while little Journey Far runs around in his bare feet.

Then the old folks will move on to the river’s edge. They ignore the writing on the ancient city wall marking the future water level, and talk about things that matter to them. “Many of us have already bought our caskets,” one of them explains. “But we won’t get to take them with us. There’s no room.”