Extreme rainstorms have struck Beijing once again. This time, the flood swept through the mountainous areas in the north. Upstream of Miyun Reservoir recorded the largest reservoir inflow since the reservoir was built in 1959, reaching 6,550 cubic metres per second—what does this figure mean? Several towns and villages upstream of the reservoir were inundated, with severe waterlogging. So far, 30 deaths have been confirmed in Miyun and Yanqing.
What truly concerns us about this flood is not only the destructiveness of the heavy rainfall, but the fact that such extreme disasters have already exceeded the response capacity of warning systems—and with climate change intensifying, these events will only become more frequent in the future.
Take the Qingshui River as an example: it originates on Wuling Mountain in Xinglong County, Hebei Province, flows through Beizhuang Town and Taishitun Town in Miyun District, and finally merges into Miyun Reservoir downstream. Miyun experienced two rounds of extreme rainfall during this event. The second downpour actually fell mainly over Xinglong County—yet in mountainous areas, the steep and complex terrain often causes a flood peak to form rapidly before it can be monitored in time. From the night of the 27th to the early hours of the 28th, upstream flash floods surged into the Qingshui River and, in the small hours of Monday morning while people were still asleep, swept through Beizhuang Town and Taishitun Town downstream in Miyun.
Sohu Farm, situated beside the Qingshui River in Beizhuang Town, saw its entire 450 mu of land swallowed by the flood. Below is the first-person account of farm owner Zhen Rui.
I. A Narrow Escape
The water reached the farm at four in the morning on the 28th. Everyone was still asleep. Within half an hour, the water had risen to one metre; half an hour later, to two. We received no evacuation notice whatsoever, and two of our colleagues were trapped on the farm.
Nobody had been worried beforehand because just the previous afternoon, when another staff member had left the farm to go home, he could see that the river was perfectly fine. Although the current was fierce and swift, the water was still thirty to forty centimetres short of the riverbank, so it seemed impossible that it could overflow. And around three in the morning on the 28th, the owner of a guesthouse on the opposite bank went out to check as well—the water was still contained within its banks.
At four in the morning, one colleague heard the sound of shattering glass. A glasshouse nearby had been torn apart. He got up and looked: the water inside had already risen twenty to thirty centimetres, and outside it was fifty to sixty centimetres deep. Beyond the glasshouse, there was nothing but an ocean of floodwater.
He hurriedly called the other colleague, who had been sleeping near the entrance. By the time that colleague answered, he could no longer make a proper call—he could see the incoming call on his phone but could not hear a single sound.
The colleague by the door sensed that something was wrong. He stepped outside and saw that the floodwater had already surged over the bridge and was barreling towards the farm. The two of them rushed for the exit, but by then they could no longer run. The water on the farm was already seventy to eighty centimetres deep—waist-high. He ran towards higher ground purely on instinct. Before long his feet left the ground, and the flood swept him three to four hundred metres, all the way to the southwest corner of our grounds, where there is a relatively high hillside, conveniently some distance from the river as well. He clutched a tree and scrambled up to the hilltop. Only then was he able to follow the slope down to the southernmost edge of the grounds, kick open the perimeter netting of the farm, and make it out to the main road. The entire ordeal took no more than half an hour.
◉ The last moments of the farm, captured on a phone by the colleague after his narrow escape in the early hours of the 28th.
They escaped at just past five in the morning and called me, asking me to urgently notify the town authorities, because they worried the town might not yet know how bad things had become. I called the duty town head and other local friends, but partway through the calls the signal dropped and all communications went down. I had been away out of town the previous week and hadn’t returned yet; that morning I was just about to head back to Beijing and spent the whole morning on the phone.
The two of them managed to reach the home of a local colleague (situated on relatively safe higher ground). I could barely sleep at all for those two days—I just wanted to get them out of there as quickly as possible. It was far too dangerous. But the national highway had been entirely swept away—no water, no electricity, no internet, nothing at all. And the forecast said Miyun would get more rain on Monday evening.
It did rain, but thankfully it stayed light and the river didn’t rise any further. On Tuesday morning the expressway reopened, and I picked them both up and brought them back to the city. They had some cuts and scrapes; the colleague who had been swept into the flood had swallowed some water, but fortunately there was no danger to their lives.
They had been badly shaken and needed to return to their hometown to recuperate for a while. The shock was truly enormous. It is hard to imagine that a flood could come in such a short time and level the entire farm—calling it a narrow escape would be no exaggeration.
The expressway is open now, and all the locals who could evacuate have done so. For the villagers still stranded, the government is providing relief—helicopters dropping supply packages, for instance. But the damage across the entire township is severe, and I expect the casualties will not be few either. The flood came at four in the morning—so massive, so sudden. Many people were still sleeping at home and had received no evacuation notice.
◉ The flood has all but erased every trace of the farm, leaving only a collapsed road base, waterlogged mud and a scattering of construction debris.
II. Flood Sweeps Away Thirty Million
The farm’s 450 mu of land was entirely flattened by the rainstorm. We are a large operation with richly diverse businesses: every year more than a hundred members rent plots to maintain their own family vegetable gardens, and the farm delivers produce to them on a fixed schedule. We also grow extensive areas of vegetables, fruit trees and grain crops, the flagship product being fresh-eating sweet corn. Each year we plant over ten crop cycles of corn, giving us a long supply window—from late June to mid-October someone is out picking corn every morning, and it ships the same day so that Beijing customers receive it that very day. When these customers hadn’t received their corn for several days, they started asking in the group chat what was going on. They were among the first to know that something had gone wrong at the farm. In addition, we have fifty or sixty mu of camping grounds and dining facilities. Now all of that is gone too.
Our farm sits right alongside the Qingshui River, on floodplain land. The very existence of the farm here is thanks to the local drive to “Learn from Dazhai in Agriculture” decades ago, when thirty to forty centimetres of topsoil was built up. Everyone worked together to create farmland, making these conditions possible. But when we first took it over, the growing conditions were still very poor—the soil was extremely sandy with almost no cohesion. To make it suitable for vegetables, we put an enormous amount of effort into improving the soil, including doubling our application of cow manure.
◉ The farm’s operations are diverse, encompassing organic produce grown in-house as well as small leased plots for family vegetable gardens, camping and dining.
Over the years, we had already improved the regularly cultivated plots to a good standard. But the flood has swept away all thirty to forty centimetres of topsoil from the farm’s 450 mu of land. Everything now exposed is bare gravel and sand—this is the most devastating blow of all. How can it be restored? Put another thirty or forty centimetres of soil back on top?
For a farm, when the soil is gone—do you understand what that means? And the unheated greenhouses, cold storage, warehouse, front-end loader, rotary tiller, tractors… over a decade’s worth of accumulation, all gone.
Moreover, the farm’s infrastructure and ground foundations have been entirely destroyed. The embankment road has been completely washed away. The farm and the river floodplain have merged into one—this land will simply be floodplain from now on. There is no point even considering whether it could be rebuilt. Adapting to the land and doing something else altogether is the only way forward.
◉ Just twenty days ago, Zhen Rui was cheerfully promoting this year’s fresh-eating sweet corn on WeChat Channels: “Familiar flavour, the flavour of a decade.”
If our farm were designated within a flood detention area, we might receive some compensation in the end—that would at least recover some of the financial losses, but I am not well informed about how that works. We had personal accident insurance for the people working on the farm, but no property insurance. How could anyone have foreseen that a flood would destroy the entire place in one stroke? Who could have imagined the kind of southern floods happening here in Beijing? Local villagers say their elders told them about a major flood here in 1958—fifty or sixty years ago. If the water truly comes, no one can withstand it.
We also asked around about the flooding in Fangshan the year before last. Many friends I know in similar situations ended up receiving not a single penny in compensation. Whether we will receive any government compensation in the end—nobody knows.
Over these two days I have been in a very low place, struggling emotionally, unable to come to terms with what has happened. The farm has been running for over a decade. Setting aside all the other unquantifiable investments, the expenses that can be clearly calculated on the books come to nearly thirty million yuan, all wiped out overnight. Yesterday when I went to pick up my colleagues, I couldn’t even bring myself to visit the site, because I simply cannot look. Over a decade, built up bit by bit, and in a single night everything is gone. I don’t know what happens next, or how to deal with any of it.
◉ On the afternoon of the flood, Zhen Rui posted on WeChat Moments to mourn the farm’s passing.These past two days, whenever friends talk, everyone keeps saying “it comes full circle”: before the “Learn from Dazhai in Agriculture” movement, this land may have looked just as it does now. Through this disaster, it has reverted to what it was fifty or sixty years ago. But we need to reflect now—is the notion that “man can conquer heaven” fundamentally flawed? Is our rigid approach to reshaping nature fundamentally wrong?
The north as a whole is warming and becoming more humid, and the rain belt is shifting northward. The climate trend going forward is more rain in the north and drought in the south—this is already becoming the norm. It will directly affect where northern farms and guesthouses choose to operate. This disaster is a lesson for everyone.
In fact, Miyun had been under a siege of rain for a full week from 23 July. According to The Paper, as of 11:00 on the 29th, rain in Beijing had persisted for 147 hours. And in this episode of northern rainfall, Beijing is just one of the affected areas. In the short week since the 23rd, Inner Mongolia, northern Hebei and other regions have experienced extraordinary torrential rain. Across the north, thirteen national meteorological stations recorded rainfall that broke historical records. Yi County even saw “a whole year’s worth of Hebei rain in a single day”.
Meanwhile, villagers in several locations upstream of the Qingshui River in Xinglong County, Chengde, Hebei, remain out of contact. Some villages began evacuating in the early hours of the 28th; some younger villagers walked to the Hebei–Beijing border on foot while the elderly waited in the village for rescue. At least eight people were killed in a landslide in Luanping County, Chengde.
◉ Map of nationwide heavy rainfall distribution, 26–27 July. Northern Hebei, Beijing and Inner Mongolia are at the centre of the disaster. Source: National Meteorological Centre.
Humans may not “conquer” heaven, but they have certainly “reshaped” it. Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions has both reinforced the long-term warming and humidification trend in the north and brought more frequent and intense extreme rainfall events.
A disaster risk expert told Caixin that since late June this year, rainfall in the north has been severely above normal. In each of three periods—late June, early July and late July—northern rainfall significantly exceeded the historical average for those periods. Chen Tao, Chief Forecaster at the National Meteorological Centre, also found that the typical North China rainy season lasts one month, beginning on 18 July and ending on 17 August, but this year the rainy season began on 5 July—the earliest since records began in 1961, an exceptionally early start.
When northern regions that have traditionally been ill-prepared for floods start experiencing ever more frequent and extreme downpours and floods, what are we to do?
Unless otherwise indicated, all images provided by Zhen Rui
