Dunhua Under Water: The Biggest Flood the Northeast Can Remember

Between 6:00 a.m. on 14 July and 6:00 a.m. on 15 July, the county-level city of Dunhua in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin Province—a city on the banks of the Mudanjiang River—recorded an average 24-hour rainfall that broke all historical extremes. Water levels in several local rivers rose relentlessly until the floods finally overflowed their banks. Approximately one-third of the city’s urban area was submerged, and many surrounding townships remained waterlogged for days.

This was the result of warm, moist air brought by Typhoon Bavi combining with an upper-level westerly trough overhead across Northeast China and the subtropical high to the east.

Dunhua sits upstream on the Mudanjiang, which flows northeast from here into Heilongjiang Province. The basin-wide flood further widened the affected area, and numerous townships in Heilongjiang launched evacuations and flood-relief operations.

In late July, Foodthink travelled to Dunhua to document the real experiences of this small city and its surrounding countryside during the floods. For many people in Northeast China, this was the worst flood they could remember. Homes were submerged, farmland destroyed, ginseng fields underwater—and for this black soil region, the water may only be the beginning. The climate has changed, and the Northeast is now facing an entirely new challenge.

Floodwater Surges into the City

Market Submerged

Days of relentless heavy rain had swollen into surging floodwaters. On 14 July, the water level in the main channel of the Mudanjiang through Dunhua rose sharply to 494.64 metres, closing in on the guaranteed water level—the absolute upper limit at which the flood defences can maintain safe operation. At 20:00, Dunhua activated a Level I flood control emergency response. An hour later, the municipal government issued an urgent evacuation advisory, warning that an extreme flood peak was imminent on the main channel. The water eventually breached the embankment and poured into the city.

Sister Juan, who runs a dried-goods wholesale stall, experienced this flood peak first-hand. By the afternoon of the 14th, the Kanghui Agricultural Trade Wholesale Market was already waist-deep.

The water surged again in the middle of the night. Worried about her stock, Sister Juan stayed behind to guard the market instead of evacuating with the others. In less than half an hour, the water inside her shop leapt from knee height to chest height. She and her husband scrambled to move goods, stacking lighter items—dried mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, dried fish—onto the iron-sheet roof of their awning, but the more valuable ginseng gift boxes were swept away. They only gave up when the iron roof began to collapse under the strain.

By the time Sister Juan and her husband evacuated, the entire market was completely submerged and strewn with wreckage. The water stood over a metre deep, with all manner of debris floating on the surface. Objects kept bumping against her chest as she tried to wade through. Only with the support of her husband, who stood a head taller than she did, could she inch her way out of the market.

The rain fell for a full day and night without pausing. By 6:00 a.m. on the 15th, the flood had exceeded the guaranteed water level by 1.21 metres, and water pooled across many residential compounds, roads, and underground spaces throughout the city. The rain only began to ease around 9:00, yet the water level was still rising.

The Mudanjiang cuts straight through Dunhua. This downpour left the entire east side of the river under water on a massive scale. A video posted on 16 July by a netizen based in Dunhua showed floodwater engulfing entire residential blocks, the city looking as though it had been plunged into a basin. A local resident told Foodthink that at least a third of Dunhua had suffered urban flooding, and in some low-lying areas even the first and second floors were inundated.

The water stood for more than two full days before it slowly began to recede on the 16th. On the 17th, Dunhua launched a city-wide programme of drainage and silt removal. Many streets were carpeted with thick mud, and haulage trucks shuttled back and forth endlessly. Some residents were still stranded. Sister Juan’s cousin, trapped on the fourth floor of her building with her child and cut off from water and electricity, was not rescued until the fourth day, when a rescue team arrived by kayak. Even as late as the afternoon of the 20th, many residents reported that their estates were still without power. The water in the basement car parks could not be pumped out, so some could only rely on generators overnight.

When Foodthink walked into the wholesale market on the 20th, a stench hit us at once: the raw reek of silt, the sour rot of meat and vegetables fermenting in the heat, all mingled with the bite of disinfectant, so sharp it stung the eyes. The ground was covered in thick sludge. To the left, thousands of soy-sauce bottles flooded by the water lay toppled against a shopfront, caked in yellow mud. Further along, freezers from a seafood stall lay piled in haphazard heaps. Wheelbarrows and refuse carts trundled ceaselessly through the aisles. Hundreds of wholesale shops that once bustled with life now sat submerged in the foul smell.

A stallholder in the vegetable section told Foodthink that a lorry-load of onions had just arrived and been unloaded on the 13th, only for the water to flood in on the 14th, destroying thousands of jin of produce. He could not help himself: ‘If only I had known there’d be a flood this big, I never would have placed that order!’

This flood exceeded anything egg wholesaler Chen Yuan could have imagined. ‘In all these years, I have never seen water like this,’ he said. When he returned to his stall, the water inside was so high he could not even see through it. Hundreds of cases of eggs and boxes of medicinal gift sets were all waterlogged, with losses exceeding a hundred thousand yuan.

The losses fell on the market stallholders, but Dunhua’s food supply over those days was also disrupted. A worker at the market told Foodthink that Kanghui is the largest agricultural wholesale market in the area: more than half of Dunhua’s produce is distributed through it, and because of the low prices, vegetable markets in some nearby county towns also come here to stock up. The closure briefly prevented some traders from restocking, nudging certain vegetable prices upward, but overall the situation remained fairly stable. Large supermarkets, with their own supply chains and the efficiency of modern logistics, saw hardly any price fluctuations.

One vegetable trader told Foodthink that at this time of year they would normally stock locally grown produce, but with many surrounding townships hit by the flood—polytunnels swept away, roads impassable—they had started sourcing small quantities from Beijing, Changchun, and elsewhere.

Pork was also in short supply. The wholesale pork stall inside the market used to sell more than a dozen whole pigs a day, but with the slaughterhouse also affected by the flood and some partner suppliers hit hard, deliveries had dropped to just two or three pigs a day—gone before the morning was out, all spoken for.

The Village Under Water for Three Whole Days

Beyond the city, several riverside towns and townships across the Northeast were hit by the flood. In many areas, roads and bridges were swept away, houses washed out, yet the rescue forces and attention they received fell far short of what urban areas had enjoyed in timeliness.

After the torrential downpour in Dunhua on the 14th, Dashitou Town and Shaheyan Town—each some 30 kilometres from the city centre—were briefly cut off like islands. Many netizens posted that they had been unable to reach family members and hoped to draw attention to their plight. Several people also told Foodthink that once disaster footage was uploaded online, local authorities would promptly demand its removal.

Many of the residents in these towns were elderly and unfamiliar with asking for help online, left with no option but to wait for rescue amid the ordeal of no water, no power, and no phone signal.

And it was these places that suffered the worst of it. In Shaheyan Town, the Shahe—one of the Mudanjiang’s major tributaries—flows from the southeast to the northwest, curving into an S-bend near the Shahe Bridge. Owing to the terrain, when the flood peak arrived, the water surged rapidly over the banks, submerging the surrounding area for hundreds of metres.

The bridgehead took the brunt of it. An old house and several polytunnels were swept away, leaving no trace. A nearby two-storey building survived, but the water still stood three metres deep. The building housed a hair salon. Its owner, Sister Qiao, recalled to Foodthink that the area had been flooded last year too, but then the water had only been about 40 centimetres deep. This time, she had placed the fridge and other appliances on waist-height tables beforehand, and she and her family had gone up to the second floor. But that very evening, the water engulfed the ground floor. The power and signal cut out almost at once, and she found herself trapped upstairs. It took five or six days before she could confirm to her children that everyone was safe.

On the afternoon of the 20th, beside the main road in Shaheyan Town, Uncle Wang was squatting in front of his doorway, cleaning machinery. The entire gateway was caked in silt. On the afternoon of the 14th, he had still been out doing carpentry work when he suddenly saw water flooding in from the south side of town. Within half an hour, it was knee-deep. Seeing the water closing in, Uncle Wang made a swift escape. Behind him, ‘the water chased people down.’

Fortunately, Uncle Wang’s eighty-five-year-old mother had already been evacuated to a school shelter beforehand. But even now, recalling that day’s ordeal, he still trembled at the thought. ‘How could I not be afraid?’

The evacuation had been so hurried that Uncle Wang grabbed nothing at all. That night, at the school shelter, each person received only a plastic sheet, and Uncle Wang and his mother lay down on theirs and slept.

At sixty, he had lived through three floods—the earliest back in the 1950s, then again in 2018. This was by far the worst: the whole village stood under water for three full days. A putrid stench pervaded everything, rising from drowned livestock. Disinfection crews were everywhere, working to ward off any outbreak of disease in the aftermath.

After three days, the water receded. Uncle Wang stepped into his courtyard once more. His storage shed had been swept away, and his farm machinery had been submerged. The water supply had just come back on, but the power was still out. He washed his clothes and shoes and left them to dry at the doorway. What weighed on him most now was the house. The brick-built home was thirty years old. Once waterlogged, it could not be lived in without repairs—and those repairs would cost a small fortune. ‘What if it floods again in a few years? No one can say for certain.’

Happily, every villager had been evacuated in time. During our visits, several told Foodthink that no locals had died, but in Changle Village, outsiders had perished in the floodwaters, unaware of the danger. Villagers said a group of young people had hitched a lift together towards Yanji for exams and family visits. With the motorway closed, the driver—unfamiliar with the local roads—took a wrong turn and ran straight into the flood. Car and passengers alike were swept into the river. Villagers who witnessed the rescue and salvage operation said neither the driver nor any of the passengers survived.

As Foodthink passed through Changle Village, we spotted rescue teams gathered at the bridgehead. The responders reaching the surrounding towns and townships were mostly local volunteer squads, along with Party member vanguard posts and cadres dispatched from higher levels.

A little past six in the evening, the sun set. Rescue teams in Shaheyan Town began heading back, the mobile signal-recovery vehicle pulled out, and connectivity dropped once more.

The power was still out. One after another, the villages sank into darkness, and the rain began again.

Two Months of Relentless Rain and Waterlogged Land

The rain had been falling for nearly two months. Ordinarily, Dunhua sows its corn in mid-to-late May. Uncle Wang remembered that he had already sown the seed and finished applying the pre-emergence herbicide before the sprouts emerged. Just as he was waiting to spray the second round, the rain began.

Chen Yuan, who lived in the city, also remembered that between May and July, only a handful of days had been clear. Though the rain was never heavy, it simply would not stop. In previous years, this stretch would see only a few days of rain.

A water-conservancy expert, who wished to remain anonymous, explained to Foodthink that the Northeast is by no means an arid, low-rainfall region—normal rainy-season precipitation is far from light. Looking at the past two to three decades, rainfall across northern China has indeed been increasing, while abnormal climate conditions have driven up the frequency of extreme rainfall events, triggering above-standard deluges in localized areas and intensifying disasters.

Xu Xiaofeng, chairman of the China Meteorological Services Association, noted the abnormality in the Northeast’s weather this year. He explained to Foodthink that from May onwards, the Northeast cold vortex and warm, moist air surging northward had anomalously formed a powerful rain belt over the region. The heavy early-season rainfall had pushed soil moisture levels high. Typhoon Bavi, upon making landfall, brought a fresh wave of moisture, producing extreme rainfall in localized areas. River levels surged, and flood discharge pressure mounted sharply. Although Bavi passed through quickly, the original rain belt over the Northeast remained powerfully persistent, compounding the disaster.

In this flood, vast tracts of farmland were ruined. As Foodthink walked along the river course, we saw that extensive corn fields near the river bends lay submerged. After the water had passed, the corn was caked in mud and flattened to the ground.

This year, Uncle Wang had rented twenty mu of land to grow corn; half of it was submerged in the flood. Even selling the remaining half of the crop would barely cover his costs. Another villager from the central village told Foodthink that roughly ninety mu of their land had been flooded, and they had lost tens of thousands of yuan on rent alone.

The relentless rain not only damaged crops and vegetables but also dealt a severe blow to the local ginseng industry. In Dunhua’s Dashitou Town, many netizens posted that the town’s ten thousand mu of ginseng fields had been affected, submerged under floodwater. Several local industry figures also confirmed to Foodthink that ginseng farmers in Dunhua, Antu, and elsewhere had suffered heavy losses.

As the foremost of the Three Treasures of the Northeast, ginseng is widely cultivated across Jilin Province. In 2025, Jilin’s ginseng output value surpassed one hundred billion yuan, with production and transaction volumes ranking first nationwide. Tonghua, Dunhua, and Baishan are all major production areas.

Since early June, ginseng farmers across Jilin had been posting online about their fields being waterlogged. By July, as multiple areas braced for the torrential rain accompanying Typhoon Bavi’s landfall, several dams carried out pre-release flood discharge. According to China Jilin Net, on 13 July Dunhua carried out pre-release flood discharge at eleven small and medium-sized reservoirs in advance, cumulatively creating 3.11 million cubic metres of storage capacity.

But the rainfall on 14 July still put severe pressure on local rivers and reservoirs. Between 06:00 on 14 July and 06:00 on 15 July, Dunhua recorded an average precipitation of 109.1 millimetres, with the 24-hour rainfall setting a new all-time local record. As of 06:00 on 15 July, ten of the city’s thirty-eight small and medium-sized reservoirs had exceeded the flood-limit water level, seven rivers had exceeded the warning water level, and six rivers had exceeded the guaranteed water level.

The water surged towards the riverside villages. In Dunhua’s Dashitou Town and Qinggouzi Township, many ginseng fields close to the river were extensively submerged.

Xiao Mei, a ginseng farmer in Dashitou Town, Dunhua, said that river water had flowed back onto her family’s fifteen mu of three-year-old ginseng field. The losses exceeded half a million yuan. Though it was not yet harvest season, she had no choice but to dig up the fresh ginseng and sell it at a pittance of just over seven yuan per jin. Another ginseng farmer in Qinggouzi Township told Foodthink that because the upstream hydroelectric plant had discharged far too much water, the river overflowed across three villages, flooding their ginseng field. A third farmer’s ten mu of ginseng field was simply swept away entirely, with losses exceeding a hundred thousand yuan.

Li Qi, a ginseng farmer from Tonghua, Jilin, told Foodthink that in the early days, all ginseng farmers grew their plants on hillsides, where good drainage naturally suited ginseng, which cannot tolerate waterlogging. But cultivation led to deforestation and soil erosion. After the state introduced forest protection policies, this practice was prohibited. Many ginseng farmers then simply “came down the mountain”, converting their arable and flatland plots for cultivation. Flatland plots are far more vulnerable to flooding. Once a ginseng bed’s drainage is inadequate and the plants sit in water for even two days, fungal pathogens proliferate, severely stunting growth. Ginseng roots are extremely intolerant of waterlogging—if the soil stays too saturated, the roots cannot breathe and the plants suffocate and die.

Liu Bing, who has been trading in wild ginseng for over thirty years, noted that in recent years many local farmers have been keen to convert their cropland for ginseng cultivation. He had run the numbers: growing corn barely yields just over a thousand yuan per mu, while ginseng, now that management costs have fallen, can bring in tens of thousands of yuan per mu in a good year—provided there is no frost or flood. Among the ginseng farmers he knew, almost none carried commercial insurance; they all felt the Northeast climate was relatively stable and that insurance was unnecessary.

But the climate has changed, and the weather challenges ginseng farmers face have grown ever more frequent. Li Qi noticed that rain was rare in May and June before, but in the past two years this period had simply become a rainy season—”rainy as the south”. The weather had also grown less cold, as though spring barely existed. Winter would end, and after just a few days of spring, the region would plunge straight into a hot, rainy summer. Last July, typhoons struck the Northeast and many ginseng farmers were flooded out; Li Qi’s family had it just as bad, “only so little of it got reported to the authorities”.

In early July, upon learning a typhoon was about to make landfall, Li Qi began digging deep drainage ditches and setting up channels and other emergency measures. Under days of torrential rain, she managed to keep her ginseng field from being flooded.

As for the future of ginseng farming, she held a near-fatalistic outlook. ‘It’s like going to war against heaven—can you ever win? There’s no overcoming it. You can only bow to the will of heaven.’

“Up the Slopes, Down the Banks”: The Land Dilemma

Many netizens posted online, questioning whether improper flood discharge by local authorities had caused the damage.

In response, the aforementioned water-conservancy expert stated that the first priority for reservoirs and other water-conservancy facilities is ensuring their own engineering safety. When torrential rain strikes, pre-release flood discharge is essential—the water level must not exceed the dam’s design flood level. Before discharging, downstream areas are typically notified so that residents can evacuate. Because the land is scarce relative to population, many traditional flood channels have been developed and exploited by residents and even local governments. Most of the areas designated for evacuation during this flood discharge in the Northeast were already floodways and flood storage areas.

Such situations are not uncommon, he noted. In the Yangtze region, some flood retention and storage areas built to a once-in-a-century standard are used for farming and habitation; these stretches of land are often fertile and, provided no major flood occurs, well suited to cultivation. Over the past few decades, however, areas around cities have been developed intensively. To maintain the state’s arable land red line of 1.8 billion mu and uphold the requisition-compensation balance, much permanent basic farmland has also been pushed “up the slopes and down the banks”. In many places, stretches of riverbank that had not flooded for decades were gradually converted into permanent basic farmland.

The question is whether rural water-conservancy infrastructure can cope with the increasingly frequent episodes of intense rainfall and the flooding they may trigger. He told Foodthink that urban embankments largely meet design standards and generally pose no major problem, but the countryside covers vast areas with dispersed watercourses, and flood-defence works cannot all be built to a high standard. Most can only withstand a once-in-a-decade to once-in-twenty-years flood.

Flood-awareness in the north also needs strengthening. In the view of Song Xianfang, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, human activity has expanded over the past few decades, ‘forgetting where the floodwater is meant to go, blurring the boundaries—places that were always destined to flood naturally suffer the damage.’

When Song Xianfang visited eastern Jilin for fieldwork in 2024, he personally experienced a flood. He told Foodthink that many affected areas still lack adequate countermeasures. He cited the example of recreational facilities built on river waterways that had not flooded for years; when the Qili River flood struck Xingtai in 2016, causing heavy casualties, all those facilities were swept away. After the Zhuozhou flood of 2023, it was only then that the area began building reservoirs and dredging river channels.

The aforementioned water-conservancy expert told Foodthink that back in the 1950s and 1960s, local farmers would carry out water-conservancy projects every winter, clearing and dredging the channels. Nowadays, with so many farmers having moved to the towns, relying entirely on professional personnel is limited in scope.

He also stressed that flood defence cannot rely on engineering alone—non-structural measures are equally essential. When floods exceed design standards, the primary strategy is to discharge rather than hold back; relying on engineering alone creates a greater conflict between people and water, with higher costs and greater risks, and once embankments are overtopped the losses are far more severe. In his view, non-structural flood defence is a relatively sound approach. He advocated strengthening forecasts, enforcing strict land-use management, avoiding the siting of high-value-added and high-tech industries in flood-prone areas, further promoting commercial agricultural insurance, and offsetting farmers’ losses through insurers and government disaster relief.

Even now, with the flood waters receding, this work remains urgently necessary. Xu Xiaofeng cautioned that the Northeast is still within the rain belt, and as the regular July rainy season sets in, flood conditions may worsen further. Some areas could be hit a second time, and vigilance is still warranted.

Days after the flood retreated, Dunhua was still in the process of rebuilding. On 20 July, Chen Yuan was bailing water from his shop when another shower swept in, rain cascading off the roof. He set his mop aside to rinse it, remarking that without the two clear days in between, he simply could not have got the shop cleaned up today.

And the weather forecast showed more rain in the coming week. According to a forecast issued by the National Meteorological Centre on 23 July, rainfall across the Northeast would continue, with heavy to torrential rain in central Heilongjiang, northern Jilin, eastern Liaoning and other areas. Severe convective weather was expected in the western part of the Northeast, with thunderstorm winds of force 8 or above, or hail.

And the rain will keep falling.

– This is Foodthink’s 827th original article –

Unless otherwise stated, all photographs in this article were taken by the author.

Interviewees Chen Yuan, Li Qi, Liu Bing, Sister Juan, and Sister Qiao are pseudonyms.

Editor: Xiao Dan

Layout: Ming Lin

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