More Than a Month After the Floods, How Are Mentougou’s Villagers Doing?
Before the Yongding River flows west to east into central Beijing, it traces a series of U-shaped bends following the contours of the hills. Longjiazhuang and Shuiyuzui villages sit on either bank of the river, linked by a road bridge.
From 29 July to 2 August, an extreme rainstorm struck the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, sending the Yongding River surging. The waters swept everything in their path as they rolled towards the low-lying urban areas. News reports at the time stated that the bridge was impassable in the floodwaters, the Fengsha railway line was severed, and Shuiyuzui village was completely cut off from the outside world. Rescue workers attempted to cross the river using ropes but were thwarted by the furious current.
More than a month after the flash floods, looking down at the Yongding River from the bridge, the scene remains unchanged:
Half the iron railings on both sides of the bridge were swept away by the flood, leaving only the bolts that held them in place. The flood embankment along the riverbank has become a dumping ground for construction debris — mud, chunks of stone wall, concrete, toppled utility poles, and high-voltage cables piled on the embankment.
An uncle stood gazing at the river, lamenting that a month ago the river did not look like this. “The Yongding River on an ordinary day is beautiful and crystal-clear — now it’s nothing but rubbish.”
I. The Market Reopens
We arrived in Longjiazhuang on the morning of 3 September. Bus Route 929, which connects the village to the town centre, had only just resumed running.
The two sides of the market told very different stories. The west side was mostly occupied by itinerant traders from outside the village, unloading wholesale fruit and vegetables from pick-up trucks and box vans. There were also stalls selling snacks, cooked foods, and sundries — the place looked quite lively.
The east side, however, is where local villagers sell their produce, and it is clear the area has not yet recovered from the floods. Nearly half the stalls are empty, lending the area a desolate air. Even on the remaining stalls, vendors have only three or four kinds of fruit and vegetables laid out. The farmers told us that because of the damage, many vegetable crops yielded nothing at all.
A local woman urged us to try her green peppers, explaining that her family’s dozen or so mu of farmland, being close to the Yongding River, had all been submerged by the floodwaters, leaving only the plots on the hillside still producing.
Another woman, selling vegetable seeds, told us the market had only just reopened and business was far from back to normal: “On an ordinary day, this road is so packed you can barely move. In normal times, we’d all be too busy doing business to have time to chat with you.”
Others mentioned that during the floods the village lost both water and electricity, and mobile phone signals went down too. Road access in and out was blocked, and nearby taxi drivers brought their vehicles here to shelter. The roads were covered in a layer of silt, a good ten centimetres deep. Even now, a thin film of pale yellow mud can still be seen on the market floor — all that remains after the clean-up.
II. “People Are Fine, the Land Is Done”
Looking upstream along the riverbank, you could see that the flood embankments on both sides had been breached, the smooth river stones used to build them now strewn across the river flats. Trees along the bank had been toppled by the overflowing waters, and the road beneath our feet was still caked with silt. The river channel stretched from west to east; between the tributary to the south and the mountains beyond lay the farmland of Longjiazhuang village.
Following a farm track out into the fields, the scene became even more harrowing: some great trees, three or four metres tall, had been uprooted entirely. On the tips of the few still barely standing, tattered pieces of clothing hung, soaked and rotting from the flood. Aunt Li explained that these were traces left when the flash flood passed through. “The height at which the clothes hang is the height of the water.”
Halfway along, the track became too muddy to drive on, so we got out and continued on foot.
Aunt Li’s plot covers about two mu, but what we saw first was not crops — a massive red steel frame, having washed up from somewhere unknown, stood in the middle of the field. Looking around, everywhere was strewn with fallen branches, weeds, and mud, tangled up with polystyrene, woven polypropylene sacks, metal buckets, and other household items and rubbish swept down from upstream. We even spotted a glass jar of coffee beans in the debris — it clearly did not belong here.
Looking into the distance, this uncleaned expanse of waste stretched all the way to the foot of the mountains.
“You can’t tell where one plot ends and another begins anymore,” Aunt Li said, gesturing at the mess of debris. In fact, were it not for the toppled corn stalks, we would have found it hard to recognise this as farmland at all. The flood had laid almost every crop flat; only a few taller fruit trees had escaped. Thick sand and silt completely covered the land, more than ten centimetres deep and uneven throughout.
Aunt Li said her well-tended hens had also been swept away by the flood. The coop had been buried directly under river mud, and she and her husband had to work very hard to dig it out. “I used to have eight hens. I could collect six or seven eggs a day. I used to feed them meat, oat flakes, mixed-grain flour, expired milk powder — anything the neighbours didn’t want, I’d give to the chickens.” The few precious hens that remained had been brought back to her home in the village, but she couldn’t bear the smell of droppings everywhere, so she decided to build a new chicken run at home.
Under the blazing midday sun, Aunt Li’s husband, Grandpa Zhang, was sorting through rubbish beside the tool shed. Opening the door, we found all sorts of items piled together in disarray from the flood, still not restored. He pointed to a water line on the wall — the flood peak had reached there, almost at eye level. “The news photos you see in the city only show a few spots. You only realise once you come here: it’s all like this — everywhere damaged. There’s nowhere that wasn’t hit.”
Since the floods, they had already tidied quite a few areas: the silt from the tool shed had been shoveled clean and piled to one side, and large pieces of timber collected during the clean-up were stacked next to the hen coop. “The timber can still be sold as scrap, but the branches can’t be burned — so what do we do?” Due to the ban on burning crop straw, villagers could only burn quietly at night.
“All this mess — just looking at it makes you sick, and you don’t even want to get started,” Grandpa Zhang said, sitting down by the field and lighting a cigarette.
“Once the flood comes, a whole year’s income is gone. People in the city have a guaranteed income whether there’s drought or flood, but for us farmers, one natural disaster, and we have nothing.”
III. “Miraculous Survival”
As the seat of Miaofeng Mountain Town’s government and close to the main road, Longjiazhuang’s disaster was hardly the worst. During the floods, it was also one of the few villages in the township that could still communicate with the outside world. Many media outlets have reported the rescue stories that unfolded here —
During the floods, the village’s water wells were all backfilled by floodwater, and the villagers temporarily lacked sources of drinking and domestic water. Only through mobile emergency water-supply equipment and water trucks dispatched by the Beijing Waterworks Group were they able to get water back. Beyond the water crisis, the government and rescue teams raced against the clock — pumping out standing water, clearing the roads, restoring communications, and disinfecting the land that had been submerged…
We also saw a power-repair crew working along the riverbank, re-erecting utility poles by the roadside. Who would think that just a short distance away, in the farmland, lay an equally overwhelming scene of chaos?
As the market reopened, life seemed to be gradually returning to normal.
At midday, shoppers came and went, and traffic jams were beginning again in the village. We had lunch at a small village restaurant; several of the neighbouring tables were occupied by villagers who knew the owner, ordering dishes to treat relatives and friends. Suddenly, a woman at the next table raised her glass and proposed a toast: “To our ‘miraculous survival’!”
People had survived, but when the village’s vitality would return was perhaps still unknown. As for compensation for the farmers, Aunt Li and her husband told us they hadn’t heard anything about it yet.
Editor: Wang Hao