Torrential rain has struck Beijing once again. This time, the flooding has swept through the northern mountainous regions. Upstream of the Miyun Reservoir, water inflow reached its highest level since the reservoir was first constructed in 1959, peaking at 6,550 cubic metres per second — but what does that figure actually mean? Numerous villages and towns upstream of the reservoir have been submerged, with severe waterlogging reported. Authorities have so far confirmed 30 fatalities across Miyun and Yanqing.
What truly raises alarm about this flooding is not merely the destructive power of the heavy rainfall, but the fact that such extreme events have already outstripped the capacity of early warning systems. Moreover, as climate change intensifies, these kinds of disasters will only become more frequent in the future.
Take the Qingshui River, for instance. Rising from Wuling Mountain in Xinglong County, Hebei Province, it flows through Beizhuang Town and Taishitun Town in Miyun District before ultimately draining into the Miyun Reservoir. Miyun endured two waves of extreme rainfall during this event, with the second torrential downpour actually falling predominantly over Xinglong County. Yet, because of the steep and rugged terrain in mountainous areas, flood peaks tend to form rapidly and are notoriously difficult to monitor in time. From the evening of the 27th into the early hours of the 28th, flash floods from upstream surged into the Qingshui River. In the early hours of Monday, while most people were still asleep, the waters swept downstream to engulf Beizhuang and Taishitun towns in Miyun.
Sohu Farm, situated along the banks of the Qingshui River in Beizhuang Town, saw all 450 mu of its land completely swallowed by the floodwaters. What follows is a firsthand account from the farm’s owner, Zhen Rui.
I. A Narrow Escape
The water came to the farm at four in the morning on the 28th. Everyone was still asleep. Within half an hour, the water had risen to a metre. Half an hour later, it was two metres high. We received no evacuation warning, leaving two colleagues trapped at the farm.
Nobody had taken it seriously beforehand. Just the afternoon before, another member of staff had left the farm to head home and seen that the river was still well within its banks. Although the flow was swift and surging, the water level sat thirty to forty centimetres below the top, leading us to assume it couldn’t possibly breach. Moreover, around three in the morning on the 28th, the owner of a guesthouse on the opposite bank came out to check, and the water was still holding within its course.
By four in the morning, a colleague heard the crash of shattering glass. It was a glass structure nearby, torn apart by the flood. Getting up to investigate, he found the floor inside already submerged by twenty or thirty centimetres, while outside the water had reached fifty to sixty. Beyond the glass, it was a vast, churning expanse of water.
He immediately rang another colleague sleeping near the entrance. By the time the call came through, the signal had already dropped, making a proper conversation impossible; all they could see was an incoming call, but no voice would come through.
Sensing something was terribly wrong, the colleague by the door stepped outside and saw the floodwaters already cresting over the bridge, surging straight towards the farm. The two of them hurried out, but the rising water soon made running impossible. On the farm grounds, the flood had reached seventy or eighty centimetres, lapping at their waists. Relying purely on instinct, he pushed towards higher ground. Before long, his feet left the ground entirely, and he was swept along by the current for three or four hundred metres, all the way to the south-west corner of our site. There happened to be a steeper, elevated slope set back from the river. He grabbed hold of a tree and managed to climb onto the rise, allowing him to scramble along the hillside to the far southern edge of the grounds. He kicked his way through the farm’s perimeter fence and finally reached the main road. The entire ordeal took less than half an hour.
◉ The final glimpse of the farm, captured on a mobile phone by colleagues who had just narrowly escaped death in the early hours of the 28th.
They made it out just after 5 am and phoned me, urging me to alert the township council straight away in case they weren’t aware of how severe the flooding had become. I tried calling the on-duty township head and several local contacts, but midway through my calls the signal dropped and all communications went down. I’d been out of town the previous week and hadn’t yet returned; that morning I was just about to head back to Beijing, and I spent the entire morning trying to get through on the phone.
They fled to the home of a local colleague, situated on relatively safe higher ground. I couldn’t sleep a wink over the next two days, consumed by one thought: I had to get them out, whatever it took. It was far too dangerous where they were. But the national highway had been completely washed away. There was no water, power, or internet connection—absolutely nothing. To make matters worse, the forecast warned of more rain for Miyun on Monday evening.
It did rain, but thankfully only lightly, and the river level failed to rise further. By Tuesday morning, the motorway was reopened. I drove them back to the city; they had sustained a few scratches, and a colleague who had been swept up by the floodwaters had inhaled some water. Fortunately, none of them were in any serious danger.
Both were thoroughly shaken and decided to return to their hometowns for a while to recover. The impact was profound. It’s hard to fathom how, in such a short space of time, the floodwaters surged in and reduced the entire farm to ruins. To call it a narrow escape from death is no exaggeration whatsoever.
The motorways are now open again. Most locals who could be relocated have been moved, and the government is providing aid to those remaining in the area, including dropping supply packs by helicopter. Nevertheless, the destruction across the entire township is devastating. I suspect the casualty toll will be significant. The waters arrived at around 4 am, were immense in volume, and struck with such suddenness that many people were still asleep in their homes and had received no evacuation warnings.
◉ The floodwaters have all but erased every trace of the farm, leaving behind only a collapsed roadbed, waterlogged mud, and scattered construction debris.
II. Floods Sweep Away 30 Million
Following the torrential downpours, the farm’s 450 mu (approximately 30 hectares) of land was completely flattened. Given its scale and diverse operations, we attract over a hundred members each year who rent plots to maintain their own family vegetable gardens, with the farm handling regular deliveries. We also cultivate extensive fields of vegetables, fruit trees and grain crops, with fresh sweet corn as our flagship product. To maintain a long supply season, we plant corn across more than a dozen successive cycles each year. From late June through mid-October, we head out every morning to harvest the crop, dispatching it the same day so that customers in Beijing can receive it fresh on the day it’s picked. When deliveries halted after just a few days, these customers immediately asked in our group chats what had happened. They were among the first to learn of our troubles. We also operated a camping site and catering service spanning around 50 to 60 mu. All of that is gone now, too.
Our farm sits right next to the Qingshui River, built on floodplain land. The very existence of the farm is due to an initiative from decades ago, when local agriculture adopted the “Learn from Dazhai” campaign and raised the ground level by laying down a soil layer thirty to forty centimetres thick. Working together, the community reclaimed the land and created the foundational conditions for cultivation. Yet when we first took over, the growing conditions remained poor. The soil was extremely sandy and lacked structural cohesion, so we invested considerable effort into soil remediation to support vegetable production, including applying heavy quantities of cattle manure.
◉The farm’s operations were diverse. Alongside our own organic crop production, we also offered small contracted family vegetable patches, camping facilities, and catering services.
Over the years, we had carefully enriched and brought the regularly tilled plots to a good state. But the floodwaters stripped away thirty to forty centimetres of topsoil across the farm’s 450 mu. What’s left exposed is nothing but sand and gravel, and that is the most devastating loss. How are you supposed to recover from that? Simply haul in another thirty centimetres of soil?
For a farm, what does it mean when the soil is gone? And then there’s the unheated greenhouses, the cold storage rooms, the warehouses, the front-end loaders, rotary tillers, tractors… More than a decade of painstaking build-up, all gone.
On top of that, all the farm’s infrastructure and ground foundations have been wiped out. The embankment road has been completely washed away. The farm and the riverbed have merged into a single stretch, and this land will simply be a floodplain from now on. There is no point in even considering rebuilding. Making the best of the new reality and putting the land to some other use is the only way forward.
◉Just twenty days ago, Zhen Rui was still cheerfully promoting this year’s fresh-eating sweetcorn on WeChat Channels: “That familiar taste, the taste of a decade.”
If our farm fell within a designated flood retention zone, we might eventually receive some financial compensation, which would help recoup a portion of the losses, but I’m not entirely clear on how that works. We had taken out personal accident insurance for everyone working on the farm, but we never bought property insurance. How could we have imagined that floodwaters would sweep the entire place away in an instant? Who would have expected Beijing to experience flooding on a scale typically seen in the south? Local villagers only know of past floods from their elders’ stories of 1958, some fifty or sixty years ago. If a flood really does come, there is simply no way to withstand it.
We also looked into the situation in Fangshan during the floods two years ago. Many friends of mine there ultimately didn’t receive a single penny in compensation. As for whether we’ll get any government support in the end? I have no idea.
I’ve been utterly heartbroken over the past couple of days. My spirits have been low, and I’ve simply been unable to come to terms with it. The farm has been operating for over a decade. Excluding other indirect costs, the clearly documented investments alone totalled nearly 30 million yuan—all wiped out in a single night. Yesterday, I went to pick up a colleague but didn’t even bother visiting the site, because I couldn’t bear to look. Built up bit by bit over more than ten years, and erased in one night. I don’t even know how to proceed with any of this.
◉On the afternoon of the flood, Zhen Rui mourned the farm’s loss on WeChat Moments.Over the past couple of days, conversations among friends have revolved around the word “cycle”: long before the “Learn from Dazhai” agricultural campaign, this land probably looked exactly like this, and following this disaster, it has reverted to what it was half a century ago. Yet we must now pause to reflect: is the notion that “humans can conquer nature” fundamentally flawed? Is our approach to forcing drastic changes upon the natural environment misguided?
Northern China is experiencing a broad warming and wetting trend, with the rain belt shifting northwards. The prevailing climate trend going forward will see heavier rainfall in the north and drought in the south; this is simply the new normal. Such shifts will directly impact site selection for farms and guesthouses across the north, and this incident serves as a stark lesson for us all.
In reality, Miyun has been encircled by rain for a full week since 23 July. According to The Paper, by 11:00 on the 29th, continuous rainfall over Beijing had already lasted 147 hours. Throughout this episode of northern precipitation, Beijing was merely one of several affected zones. In the brief week since the 23rd, areas including Inner Mongolia and northern Hebei have been struck by torrential downpours. Across the north, rainfall at 13 national meteorological stations shattered historical records, with Yi County even said to have “received a year’s worth of Hebei’s rainfall in a single day”.
Meanwhile, residents across the upper reaches of the Qingshui River and multiple villages in Xinglong County, Chengde, Hebei Province, remain cut off from contact. Evacuations in some villages began in the early hours of the 28th; while some younger villagers walked on foot to the border between Hebei and Beijing, elderly residents remained behind in their villages awaiting rescue. A landslide in Luanping County, Chengde, has claimed at least eight lives.
◉ Map of heavy rainfall across China, 26–27 July. The disaster epicentre lies around northern Hebei, Beijing, and Inner Mongolia. Image source: China Meteorological Administration.
Humans may not be able to “conquer” nature, but we have undeniably “reshaped” it. Climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions is accelerating the long-term warming and wetting trend in the north, while simultaneously triggering extreme precipitation events that are both more frequent and more intense.
A disaster risk expert told Caixin that northern rainfall has been significantly above average since late June. During three distinct periods—late June, early July, and late July—precipitation levels across the north markedly exceeded historical averages for the same time of year. Chen Tao, chief forecaster at the China Meteorological Administration, also noted that the North China rainy season traditionally spans one month, running from 18 July to 17 August. This year, however, it began on 5 July, marking the earliest onset since 1961 and classifying it as abnormally early.
When northern regions, historically underprepared for flood defence, begin to face increasingly frequent and extreme storms and floods, what course should we take?
Unless otherwise stated, all images are courtesy of Zhen Rui.
