Over a Month After the Floods, How Are Mentougou Villagers Faring?
Before winding eastwards into Beijing’s urban centre, the Yongding River traces a series of U-shaped bends through the hills. The villages of Longjiazhuang and Shuiyuzui lie on opposite banks, linked by a single road bridge.
From 29 July to 2 August, extreme rainfall across the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region caused the Yongding River to swell dramatically. The floodwaters swept everything in their wake, rolling towards the low-lying city. Contemporary news reports noted that the bridge was rendered impassable by the rising waters, the Fengsha railway line was washed away, and Shuiyuzui village was entirely cut off. Rescue teams attempted to cross using ropes, but were forced to abandon the effort due to the torrent’s ferocious current.
Over a month after the flash floods, looking down at the Yongding River from this bridge reveals a scene still bearing the scars of the disaster:
The metal railings along both sides of the bridge have been torn half-way away by the floodwaters, leaving only the nails that anchored them; the riverbank’s flood defences have become a makeshift dump for rubble, with earth, shattered stone walls, concrete slabs, toppled utility poles and high-voltage cables piled along the embankment.
Gazing down at the river, a local man said regretfully that it had not looked like this a month ago. “Usually, the Yongding River is beautiful and clear. Now it’s just full of rubbish.”
I. The Reopened Market
We arrived in Longjiazhuang on the morning of 3 September. Just before our visit, the No. 929 bus route to the city centre had resumed service.
The scene on either side of the market is strikingly different. On the west side, most stalls are run by traders from outside the village, unloading wholesale fruit and vegetables from pickups and vans. Beyond these are numerous vendors selling snacks, cooked food and general goods, making for a bustling atmosphere.
The eastern section is reserved for local growers, yet it clearly bears the marks of the recent floods and has yet to bounce back. Nearly half the stalls stand empty, casting a desolate air over the area. Even those in use are sparsely laid out, typically displaying just three or four varieties of vegetables and fruit. The farmers explained that flood damage has meant many crop varieties simply failed to yield a harvest.
A woman from the village approached us to sell her green peppers. She told us that her plot of over ten mu, situated close to the Yongding River, had been completely submerged by the floodwaters. Only the fields further up on the mountain managed to produce a crop.
Another woman, selling vegetable seeds, told us that the market had only just reopened and trade was far from back to normal: “Usually this thoroughfare is shoulder to shoulder with people; you can hardly move a foot. In better times, we’d be far too busy doing business to have time for a chat.”
Others recalled how the village had been left without water or electricity, and mobile phones were useless with no signal. Roads in and out were impassable, and taxis from nearby areas had taken shelter here. In the wake of the flooding, the roads were blanketed in mud a solid three inches deep. Even now, a thin crust of dried yellow silt remains on the ground, a residual trace left after the clearing work.
II.“We’re alright, but the land is ruined.”
Looking upstream along the bank, the flood defences on either side had been completely washed out. The riverbed was strewn with the cobblestones that once formed the embankments, trees along the edge had been toppled by the surge, and the road beneath our feet remained thick with silt. The river flows eastwards, and sandwiched between its tributaries and the mountains to the south are the fields belonging to the villagers of Longjiazhuang.
Driving along a narrow farm track towards the fields, the devastation only grew worse: trees three or four metres tall had been ripped out by their roots, while the bare branches of those that had barely stayed upright were snagged with clothes, sodden and ruined by the floodwaters. Aunt Li said these were the markers left by the deluge. “The higher the clothes hang, the higher the water rose,” she told us.
Halfway there, the track became too bogged down to drive, so we simply abandoned the car and pressed on foot.
Aunt Li’s plot covers roughly two mu (about half an acre), but the first thing that met our eyes was not crops—a massive red steel frame, washed in from who knows where, stood starkly in the middle of the field. Looking around, the ground was littered with toppled branches, weeds and mud, all tangled with polystyrene, woven sacks, metal buckets and other household detritus washed down from upstream. We even spotted a glass jar of coffee beans sitting in the soil, clearly miles from home.
Gazing outwards, the uncleared wasteland of debris stretched all the way to the foothills.
“You can’t even tell where the rows used to be,” Aunt Li said, gesturing at the debris-choked ground. Without the leaning cornstalks as a reminder, it would have been impossible to recognise this as a working field. The flood had flattened almost every crop; only a few taller fruit trees had escaped the worst of it. A heavy layer of silt, a good ten centimetres thick and uneven in places, now completely smothered the soil.
Aunt Li told us that her prize hens had also been swept away in the flood, and the coop itself had been buried under river mud, taking the couple ages to dig out. “I used to have eight hens and could collect six or seven eggs a day,” she recalled. “I’d feed them meat, oats, mixed grain flour, expired milk powder—whatever the neighbours didn’t want, I’d save for the chickens.” The few surviving hens were brought back to her house in the village, but unable to bear the smell of their droppings indoors, she has now decided to construct a proper coop on the premises.
Under the harsh midday sun, Aunt Li’s husband, Mr Zhang, was sorting through the debris beside the toolshed. Pushing open the door, we found tools and odds and ends thrown into a jumbled heap by the flood, none yet returned to their proper places. He pointed to a dark waterline on the wall—the mark left by the peak of the surge—which came up almost to eye level. “The news photographs you see in the city only show a handful of spots. You have to come and see it for yourself to realise that this is what it’s like everywhere. There’s nowhere left untouched.”
They’ve managed to clear up quite a few areas since the flood: the silt from the old toolshed has been scraped out and piled to one side, while the large wooden planks they’ve collected are stacked beside the chicken coop. “These planks can still be sold as scrap, but what are we to do with the branches? We can’t burn them.” With crop-burning strictly prohibited, villagers have had to resort to setting fires secretly after dark.
“Just looking at this mess is enough to get on your nerves. I don’t want to touch it.” Mr Zhang sat by the edge of the field, lighting a cigarette.
“When the flood came, it wiped out an entire year’s income. People in the city are paid come rain or shine, but for farmers, a single natural disaster leaves them with nothing.”
III. Surviving the Aftermath
Situated near a main road and housing the town government, Longjiazhuang in Miaofengshan Town suffered far from the worst of the damage. During the flood, it was also one of the few villages in the area that managed to keep in contact with the outside world. A number of media outlets have previously covered rescue and relief stories from here—
When the flood struck, backflow contaminated the village’s water wells, leaving residents temporarily without drinking or domestic water. It was only through mobile emergency water supply units and tankers delivered by the Beijing Water Group that the villagers regained access to water. Beyond that, government officials and rescue teams worked against the clock on relief operations, pumping out standing water, clearing roads, restoring communications, and disinfecting the flood-damaged land…
By the riverbank, we also spotted a powerline repair crew erecting new utility poles along the roadside. Who would have thought that just a short distance away, in the fields, the scene of devastation would remain so overwhelming and difficult to clear?
With the weekly market back up and running, daily life seems to be gradually returning to normal.
By midday, crowds heading to the market were coming and going, and the village roads had begun to congest. We ate lunch at a small local restaurant. The tables around us were filled with villagers who knew the owner, ordering a few dishes to treat relatives and friends. Suddenly, a woman at the next table raised her glass and proposed a toast: “Let’s drink to surviving the ordeal!”
The villagers have survived, but it remains uncertain when they will truly recover. As for compensation for the farmers, Mr and Mrs Li told us they had not yet heard anything about it.
Editor: Wang Hao