People, Birds, Melons: 20 Years After the Wuhan Floods

Between March and August this year, I made several trips to Tianxingzhou and the Lüdāo residential area in Wuhan. Situated in the suburbs of Hongshan District, Tianxingzhou is a river island surrounded on all sides by water. It has a history of watermelon cultivation stretching back more than a century and is known as ‘Melon Isle’ for its abundant harvests. Repeatedly battered by Yangtze River floods, the island was designated in 1999 to serve as a flood discharge channel. The government introduced a ‘people-only retreat’ policy for polders: residents withdraw, but the cultivated land remains—when a major flood hits, the land villagers have worked must yield to the water. Outside the flood season, however, villagers can continue to work and live on the island. Since then, public facilities such as schools and hospitals have been gradually relocated. In 2002, most island residents moved into the Lüdāo residential area on the opposite bank, with only a small number of elderly people still living on the island. In ” Tianxingzhou’s Watermelons, Ripening with Particular Difficulty This Year” I documented this year’s unusually difficult watermelon season on Tianxingzhou and the people who are still growing them.

I was curious about the older generation of watermelon growers and their experiences in the fields, and I wanted to know how their livelihoods and daily lives had changed since moving into apartment blocks. I also wondered whether Tianxingzhu still held some kind of place in people’s lives.

An elderly woman waved her hand to decline my interview: “You just want to write about how we moved to the city and our lives have gotten better, right?” Someone else said: “Reporters keep asking about the floods, the floods — it gets on your nerves.” These refusals were a reminder: if I started only from the floods, their experiences would be easily reduced to a formula — hit by floods, left the island, moved into the city, life improved. During my visits, the Lüdão residential complex was being demolished. A resident named Lao Yu said: “If you come next year, you won’t find this place anymore.”

Will life be better in the future?

Giving Up Growing Watermelons

Late in March, I made my first visit to the Lüdão residential complex and came across Chen Lan, Zhou Xia, and Lao Yu, the three of them sitting in a circle at the foot of a building, chatting away. They had all belonged to the same production brigade in Tianxing township and were in their early sixties. They had been born on Tianxingzhu, had followed their parents out to the fields from a young age, and learned to grow watermelons and vegetables through the rhythm of daily labour.

The white wall behind them had weathered and mottled; black cables and white plastic drainpipes crisscrossed along its surface. At the foot of the building, polystyrene boxes and plastic buckets stood in tidy rows, growing spring onions, garlic, Chinese cabbage stems, and chillies. In the stairwell, a rake, a spade, and a small hoe leaned against the wall. Outside the complex was an OCT construction site.

Lao Yu, who had given up growing watermelons, still remembered the days of rising at three in the morning to plant them. “The moon hadn’t set, the stars were still out, and we were already in the fields — thinning the seedlings, pricking out the shoots. We worked until we couldn’t see, often not going to bed until ten, twelve.” “Brutally hard work.”

Zhou Xia remembered. If a cold snap came in early spring, they would go to the nursery shed every day as if going to work, keeping watch over the seedlings. They stuck thermometers into the seed beds and held the temperature at thirty-seven or thirty-eight degrees; only then would the melon seedlings grow well. When it ran cold, they switched on the electric heating cables. When it ran hot, they cut the power and opened the beds. At night, they draped bedding or straw mats over them to hold the warmth.

While waiting for the melon seedlings to grow strong, Chen Lan prepared the ground, applied base fertiliser, and laid plastic film. Once the seedlings were transplanted, she erected small arch tunnels to protect them from the cold. When the vines grew, she took the tunnels off and set about training the main vines and pruning the side shoots. When the work got heavy, neighbours would pitch in to help one another.

Back then, when Chen Lan and her husband went out to work in the fields, they had to bring the children along. Once, she spread a hemp bag on the ground for the kids to sit and play, and when she came back at midday to cook, she lifted the bag and found a coiled snake underneath. “Thank goodness the snake didn’t bite the children!” Zhou Xia said with a laugh.

Once the watermelons were grown, the next challenge was getting them off the island. The ripening season for watermelons coincided with the Yangtze’s high-water period. If a flood was coming, they had about ten days to prepare before the levee was breached for flood discharge.

At that time, the Tianxingzhu Yangtze River Bridge had not yet been built, and crossing the river was a matter of speed and positioning. People had to compete with tractors, cars, flatbed carts, and bicycles for the ferry. Zhou Xia remembered that they would start queuing at four in the morning, the line stretching from the riverbank up onto the embankment; some people waited until noon. “We women had to go too,” Zhou Xia said. The ferry deck, front to back, was loaded with flatbed carts piled with watermelons.

If they missed the crossing, the unripe melons would be left in the fields to be flooded and would rot. So — “Waist-deep water, all the melons in the fields floating on the surface. We waded in and fished them out, put the ones we salvaged into dry bowls, and moved them to higher ground.” Zhou Xia recalled how everyone scrambled to relocate the melons and other belongings from home, but after a full day of the sun beating down, the watermelons had gone spongy and rotted anyway.

On top of losing their investment of ten or twenty thousand yuan, they had nowhere to go. Some went to stay with relatives or friends in the city; others were resettled by the government in school buildings. The water typically took a month or two to recede. The longest time, they sheltered from July right through to September, only going back once the new term began. As soon as the water ebbed, they seized the chance to return to the island, check on their belongings, and scatter some cabbage seeds in the fields — so that when they did come back, there would be something to eat.

For several years, Chen Lan’s household was half in wage labour, half in farming. Her husband went out to earn money on jobs elsewhere; she stayed on the island working the fields, and the money he sent back went straight into the land. She remembers how a basket of watermelons could weigh a hundred or two hundred jin, and how she would load them onto a cart entirely by herself. In spring they grew melons, in autumn cotton; they also kept pigs and cattle. Once they had saved enough, they started building the house — bricks, plastic sheeting, bituminous felt — she went out to buy all of it herself. One evening, a neighbour, noticing she had not come home for dinner, gathered four people to go looking in the fields. By the time they found her, she had been lying unconscious in the paddy for some time.

An elderly villager once urged her: “Girl, don’t work yourself so hard — if you do, you’ll end up with all sorts of ailments.” But with a whole family of old and young to feed, she had no choice but to disregard the old woman’s advice. A few years ago, Chen Lan had an operation on her back and spent half a year at home in bed after the surgery. “There’s nothing we can do about it now; all we can do is have operations,” Zhou Xia quipped.

After the levee enclosure retreat programme, infrastructure such as schools and hospitals was relocated off Tianxing Island. To make sure the children could get to school, they could no longer live on the island.

But in the more than ten years since they moved, Chen Lan and Zhou Xia kept going back to Tianxing Island, picking up odd jobs and tending their fields. It was not until April 2024 that the ferry service between Wuhan and Tianxing Island was “temporarily suspended” and has yet to resume.

They had no choice but to give up returning to the island. For a while, Chen Lan cleared some waste ground outside the residential compound and planted watermelons there, which someone stole. Now their days are spent cooking and doing housework, looking after their grandchildren, and “growing a few vegetables for fun” in the plot beneath the building.

“Have you been up to Tianxing Island? The rapeseed flowers have grown really tall now — they’re absolutely beautiful.” Zhou Xia asked me. The rapeseed fields she mentioned covered more than ten mu and belonged to her family; they had been leased to an agricultural company, and every spring they burst into a blaze of brilliant yellow.

The veteran melon farmers once lost everything to the floods, even saying they would have to “beg on the streets.” But after each flood, they returned to grow melons. After 1999, the frequency of flooding decreased. The floods were not the only reason they left agriculture.

What truly changed things was a series of slow, persistent structural shifts: schools, hospitals and other infrastructure were relocated off the islet, the ferry was cancelled, and they grew older. The land-use designation for the islet remained undetermined for years, and agriculture lacked support. Tianxing Zhou could no longer sustain the long-term basic livelihood of most local residents.

The focus of family life shifted toward work in the city and the education of the third generation. In the previous article, the Yuzhen couple had turned to casual work as a more stable source of income, returning to the islet two or three times a week for farm work. Chen Lan’s children work in the city, often too busy to come home for meals; by her estimate, the family had spent around 200,000 yuan on enrichment classes for her granddaughter. For these families, farming was long since no longer a primary livelihood but had gradually become a routine practice to “kep the food supply more reassuring” — one that also provided supplementary income, sustained social connections, and maintained the bond between people and their homeland. Despite having lived in the Green Island estate for over twenty years, the older generation of melon farmers still considered themselves rural people. They returned to the islet for ancestor worship at Qingming, occasionally bringing the children back to Tianxing Zhou to drive on the sand, but no longer letting them work the land.

“The children don’t know how to grow melons anymore. They only know how to eat them,” said Zhou Xia.

On one occasion, the driver who took me to Tianxing Zhou grumbled, “Are they building jets and cannon on this place? Why won’t they let anyone come?”

In 2009, the Tianxing Zhou Yangtze River Bridge opened to traffic. Before that, the only way to reach the islet was by boat.

Yet over the past twenty years, Wuhan’s metro has grown from a single line to thirteen, and bus routes have expanded to 2.9 times their original coverage — and still, no regular public transport now reaches the islet. The Tianqing ferry line, which served Tianxing Zhou, was suspended following a notice from the maritime authority. The municipal transportation bureau responded that the suspension was due to safety hazards on the pier ramp.

I learned from villagers that a custom bus service existed, but neither the boarding point nor the alighting point was made public. One of the original purposes of the service was to allow former villagers to return and farm, yet the bus did not go directly to the Green Island estate — one first had to catch another bus to reach the boarding point. Some people also noticed that for a period, residents from off the islet were not allowed to board.

Behind the transport difficulties lies Tianxing Zhou’s still-undetermined land-use plan. A public reply from the district government on 25 August 2026 confirmed that the islet’s development would prioritise ecological protection while balancing agricultural, cultural and tourism use with agricultural production, but the specific plan was still being drafted and reviewed.

Once, I hired a bicycle and rode along the embankment. Occasionally, a small path branched off the roadside toward the fields. Three middle-aged men sang karaoke beneath an overpass, while cars and trains passed over the Tianxing Zhou Yangtze River Bridge from time to time.

This forgotten island-within-an-island was once a mecca for off-road enthusiasts. After the pandemic, over a thousand off-road vehicles once flooded onto the head of the islet, and an accident in which a pedestrian was struck occurred. A booking system was then introduced for access to the islet. Vehicle numbers were capped at around three hundred per day, further restricting foot traffic.

With human activity in decline, the black stork—a national first-class protected species—has appeared on Tianxingzhou. A volunteer from the Wuhan Birdwatching Association told me that after the river recedes in winter, the sandbars are left dotted with small pools of food-rich water, which have become the black storks’ “canteen.” In 2025, fifty-four black storks were recorded on Tianxingzhou, a near fivefold increase over twelve years ago. More and more birdwatchers, binoculars and cameras in hand, make their way to the bar in search of species that favour sandbar habitats, and Tianxingzhou’s name is appearing with increasing frequency in birdwatching groups and official accounts.

In early May, I found three ringed plover eggs in the middle of a gravel path at the head of the bar, where it stretched out into the river. Tianxingzhou’s bare, open sandbars serve as a breeding ground for the summer migrants white-fronted tern and ringed plover.

As with the agriculture here, the birds’ breeding is a race against the river. In previous years, young birds could be seen in force on the bar flats by June; this year, with heavier rainfall and the Yangtze running high, the beaches at the head and tail of the bar remained submerged for longer. Should the first round of breeding fail, they will try again once the water recedes. But the time left for the chicks to grow and practise flying before their autumn migration is correspondingly shorter. In Wuhan, no other breeding sites for these species have yet been identified.

As the bar’s agricultural value has been downplayed, its ecological and tourism value has increasingly come to the fore. In 2020, Hongshan District designated a restricted zone at the head of Tianxingzhou; in March 2021, the Wuhan Municipal Bureau of Landscaping and Forestry brought the bar’s wild bird habitat under protected status.

For the melon farmers, birds once meant loss. Zhou Xia told me that everything in the fields comes to eat their melons—birds, hedgehogs, rats. “The birds are remarkably clever. They know which melons are ripe. Even if you cover them with grass, they’ll pull the grass aside and peck a hole straight through, rendering them unsellable.” Yuzhen had tried using reflective tape to scare the birds off. It worked at first, but after a while, the birds lost their fear. “It’s not just birds—some villagers saw wild boar just the other day,” she said.

Others hold a different view. “What the birds leave behind is what we should be eating,” said Xiao Cao, who came from Henan.

Xiao Cao is thirty years old and came to Tianxingzhou three years ago to practise organic cultivation. He believes that people should live in harmony with nature, maintaining the balance of a system. That day, as I approached his field, a flock of golden buntings startled into the air, their gold feathers flashing among the shrubs at the field’s edge for a moment before they settled back down.

The vehicle restrictions have reduced disturbance to bird habitats but have also limited the number of visitors who come to pick fruit and spend money. Every weekend, villagers still run quad bike rides at the head of the bar, hoping to eke out a little more income from passers-by. Volunteers from the birdwatching association say the villagers are always asking the association and the district government to loosen things up. “Are the birds more important, or are our lives more important?” the villagers ask them.

Footfall remains sparse. On the bar flats of Tianxingzhou, overwintering black storks have their “canteen,” and summer migrants—the ringed plover and white-fronted tern—raise their young here. On the other side of the Yangtze, the old melon farmers who left the bar island face relocation once more.

The Second Relocation

At the end of May, I returned to the Lüdǎo compound. A large truck laden with rubble rolled out through the gates. I turned away to dodge the cloud of dust it sent billowing into the air. I didn’t see the aunties and uncles who usually sat downstairs chatting. When I found Chen Lan, she was at a neighbour’s, where they were in the process of moving out.

Back at home, Chen Lan switched on the fan and said, ‘It’s stuffy out there. I don’t feel like sitting outside.’ Several bags of medicine sat stacked on the dining table and the TV cabinet. Her hands were never idle – peeling garlic one moment, snapping off water spinach the next, then shavings ginger.

Zhou Xia downstairs rang to remind her it was raining outside and she should bring in the washing. Chen Lan set down the garlic in her hands and went into the kitchen. Her flat had no balcony; the washing hung from a bamboo pole that jutted out beyond the kitchen window. She lifted the pole, gathering the clothes one by one, then rose on her toes to hang the empty hangers back on the metal hooks on the wall.

Speaking of the first relocation, twenty-four years ago, Chen Lan said she had found it very hard to settle into the Lüdǎo compound at first. In the city, money was needed for everything, and she couldn’t trust the vegetables from the shops either; on Tianxing Island, by contrast, they ate what they grew themselves and rarely spent a penny in the ordinary course of things.

Over time, she gradually settled in, and her connection to Tianxing Island never quite broke. Once, taking the ferry back to the island, the river wind hit her face and she felt her chest go ‘wide open.’ Although she no longer farmed herself, neighbours who still worked the land on the island would send over vegetables, and she would wrap zongzi in return.

According to the 2018 draft comprehensive urban design for the Yangchunhu Business District in Wuhan, the plot on which the Lüdǎo compound sits in Tianxing Township is now zoned as premium commercial land (for the construction of a landmark building for the area) and occupies a key node along the district’s axis, making it an unavoidable area in the future development of the Yangchunhu High-Speed Railway Business District. The residents of Lüdǎo will be allocated to three completed resettlement compounds, a bus stop or two from their current homes.

Outside the window, a yellow excavator worked its way through the compound, the character for ‘demolish’ visible on every surface. The community health centre had already been torn down. Scrap trucks came and went, and from time to time the shrill whine of an angle grinder cutting through air-conditioning brackets echoed out. Many residents complained to me about the prospect of yet another relocation. ‘If Tianxing Island hadn’t been flooded, I wouldn’t want to move either.’ Some of the older residents still refused to accept the demolition terms and hadn’t signed, while one resident about to leave said everyone she knew had already moved: ‘I can’t just stay here on my own, either.’

More than twenty years ago, the islanders left Tianxing Island, carrying their melon-farming community into the Lüdǎo compound. Now, what will be demolished is not just the housing; the relationships sustained by shared labour, the exchange of food, and day-to-day care may, too, be scattered and reassembled. Whether they will survive into the next place of residence remains an open question.

Those Who Have Slowed Down

As the older generation of watermelon farmers step back, large stretches of land on Tianxingzhou have been transferred to agricultural companies and growers from out of town. Fewer locals remain, but outsiders have arrived. They have opened more than ten picking farms, many of them, like Xiao Cao, from Henan.

Xiao Cao used to study computer science and work in Wuhan, but prolonged sitting and sleepless nights left him ill; he even had a minor operation. After leaving hospital, he tried several agriculture-related jobs. Eventually he took a liking to Tianxingzhou, leased some land, and set up an organic farm growing strawberries, watermelons, tomatoes, and other produce. He had farmed in the countryside as a child and now continues to read agricultural papers. He scooped up a handful of his improved soil and showed it to me: ‘Every single one of these is a crumb.’ Crumb structure refers to the loose aggregates formed when fine soil particles bind together. He told me the soil now has more organic matter, with greater earthworm and microbial diversity, and is looser and better aerated.

‘There are many ways of living; I chose the one that best suits my body.’ Xiao Cao no longer stays up late. He gets up at half past four every morning and, once it lightens, heads out to the fields to check the greenhouses, inspect the crops, and look for pests and diseases — the daily work keeps his bones and muscles limber.

But the work is especially grueling in bad weather. He remembered a snowfall at the start of one year when he could not sleep a wink all night. ‘I was alone, guarding the greenhouses, clearing snow all night long.’ As he spoke, he raised his arm and mimed the motion of pushing snow from inside the greenhouse. He worked from one greenhouse to the next — a little while in each, breaking into a sweat, then crawling into the car to warm up. Some greenhouses had no stove; all he could do was light a small wood fire to raise the temperature just enough. Once his body warmed up, he went back to work. The car never switched off all night.

Apart from farming, Xiao Cao promotes the farm on social media and handles customer enquiries before and after sales. His operation is not large enough to command good prices through wholesale; his sales depend entirely on repeat customers, group orders, and visitors coming to the island to pick their own produce. Next, he plans to learn how to write marketing copy.

He still believes you can ‘dig up gold’ from the soil: ‘Truly high-quality produce will only become scarcer and more expensive in the future.’ But both the techniques and the sales channels need time to mature.

Another man’s plot borders Xiao Cao’s. Before retiring, he worked at the Yangtze River Hydrology and Water Conservancy Design Institute. When I visited, he was pushing a walk-behind tiller across the field. Xiao Cao told me that the family comes to Tianxingzhou whenever they can to farm and keep chickens — like many others, they are here not entirely for the money, but because they enjoy rural life.

‘I don’t want to work so hard this year. A steady, sustainable pace is enough. If you want to make a fortune all at once, you’re gambling with your life — and there’s no point in that,’ he said.

Guiying feels the same way. “Just don’t work yourself to death at it. Treat it as a kind of pastime — a quiet life is best lived quietly.” As mentioned in the previous article, the sixty-year-old Guiying is one of the local melon farmers still cultivating melons on Tianxingzhou. She once lived in the Lüdao residential estate for over a decade, running a restaurant and doing cleaning work, but she could never quite settle into city life. Three years ago, she and her family returned to Tianxingzhou, where they kept chickens, ducks and geese, looked after dogs, and grew vegetables.

People who come here seem to catch the rhythm too. On one occasion, the driver who was taking me to Tianxingzhou was particularly distressed about having accepted the job, left the city, and missed out on the platform’s rush-hour bonus. It was only when the car reached the island that she looked out the window and said, “This place would be perfect for camping. You could bring the kids to play here.”

The driver, too, had grown up in the countryside. When I visited the farmers, she got out of the car with me.

In the fields, a hen led her chicks foraging while ducks soaked in a basin of water beneath a tree. The driver held up her phone and sent a video on WeChat: “Anyone fancy some vegetables?” Within ten minutes, she had bought two large bags of freshly picked greens.

Though Guiying’s family had built up a customer base through a livestreaming platform, the difficulty of getting to the island often meant they couldn’t sell all their vegetables. “The hardest part of farming is the selling,” she said. In front of Guiying’s house, a cluster of white butterflies had settled on the ground, and in the distance a cuckoo and a four-note cuckoo called in alternation. “One day a butterfly landed on me and wouldn’t go away, no matter how much I shooed it,” Guiying said.

Tianxingzhou’s Dantui Min Yuan polder has been left as space for floodwater to pass through, while urban renewal has converted the land of the resettlement estates into higher-value commercial plots. The original residents of Tianxingzhou have repeatedly surrendered the spaces they depended on for their livelihoods and daily lives, forced to readjust their means of sustenance, their routines, and their relationship with their homeland. Displacement driven by disaster risk and urban renewal is not unique to this place. The story of Tianxingzhou leaves a question: should resettlement, beyond providing housing, also account for the livelihoods of displaced residents and the long-formed ties of their daily lives?

On Tianxingzhou and in the Lüdao estate, I witnessed a way of life I was not familiar with: exchanging labour during busy farming seasons, sharing the food they harvested, looking after one another in everyday life. Their shared experiences and way of living had formed a tangible, concrete sense of “the neighbourhood.” I hope this community can continue for longer.

In Chen Lan’s imagining of the future, Tianxingzhou had not yet fully become the past. “I always think of going back to Tianxingzhou. I’d just grow some vegetables for myself — not sell them, no more selling. The vegetables from Tianxingzhou taste especially good,” she said.

To protect the privacy of interviewees, Chen Lan, Zhou Xia, Lao Yu, Xiao Cao and Gui Ying are all pseudonyms.

Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are by the author.

Edited by Pei Dan

Layout by Xiao Cun

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