The Breached Dam, the Unreachable, the Lost Harvest

Foodthink Says

Relief efforts for the floods in Guangxi are ongoing. In the hardest-hit area, Hengzhou in Nanning, the floods have swept through jasmine, paddy rice, sugarcane and banana cultivation, as well as fisheries and pig farming. As recently as the past two years, Hengzhou County had been strengthening farmland irrigation, and under the new tea beverage boom, many had expanded their jasmine plantings — now the losses are all the greater. Extraordinary disasters have become the norm, and climate change has been written into the 2026 national No. 1 Document. How to move from ‘flood control’ toward resilience, what can be defended against and what cannot — rural and urban areas alike need better solutions.

The rain was too heavy!

Can the reservoirs hold?

On the morning of 6 July, Zhong Luyan, a villager in Zhongtuan Village, Hengzhou, Nanning, received a broadcast warning from the village. She could see committee members going from door to door, notifying residents that a nearby reservoir was about to open its gates to release water and to take care. Zhong Luyan judged that the reservoir near the village had a small capacity and that her house and farmland, situated on a high slope, were relatively safe, so she chose to stay home and observe. Before long, she heard the news that the dam at Liulan Reservoir, more than ten kilometres away, had breached. Yunbiao Reservoir, five kilometres from Liulan and likewise in the upper reaches of the Yu River, overflowed at the same time.

◉Reservoirs in the Yu River basin—a tributary of the Xijiang—where dangerous conditions have emerged. Liulan Reservoir and Yunbiao Reservoir discharge into the Yu River via the Zhenlong River and Yunbiao River respectively. Both rivers originate from Zhenlong Mountain, the area that received the heaviest concentration of rainfall in this event. In addition, floodwaters from the Dongban and Shidiao Rivers, and from the Huanglian–Liyu River system, flow into the Yu River from the west and east respectively. Source: Foodthink

Zhong Luyan was ‘lucky’ — the reservoir discharge did not flow through her jasmine fields on the hillside, and only a fraction of her field ridges were submerged. Yet the phones of the many other Hengzhou farmers we tried to contact were all unreachable due to signal loss.Online rescue appeals indicated that the entire Zhenlong Township in Hengzhou City had lost all communication, and as of the morning of the 9th, signal had still not been restored.

In Dahe Village and Beicun, Hengzhou Town, lying farther from the reservoir breach, villagers’ houses were temporarily spared, but floodwater reached three metres deep. Over a thousand villagers had nearly 10,000 mu of jasmine and rice paddies submerged.

Since 3 July, under the influence of this year’s Typhoon No. 10, ‘Mesak’, Guangxi has experienced historically rare, widespread and sustained heavy rainfall, with over 77 per cent of townships and towns province-wide hit by torrential rain. According to Xinhua, by 11:00 on the morning of 9 July, a total of 64,500 people in Nanning had been evacuated and housed, of whom 54,500 were in Hengzhou and 9,321 in Binyang County. In addition, 375,000 people across the province were affected by the disaster, with 39 deaths confirmed and 9 people missing; the affected crop area totalled 12,900 hectares.

The most notable event amid the flooding was the breach of the Liulan Reservoir dam on the morning of the 6th.

Liulan Reservoir is situated on the Yunbiao River, a tributary of the Yu River, in Liulan Village, Xiaoyi Town. It is the largest medium-sized reservoir in Hengzhou, responsible for irrigation and domestic water supply for 4 townships, 46 administrative villages, and a combined population of 170,000. Its stable irrigation area covers 157,300 mu, and it also serves as an important backup water source for Hengzhou’s urban area. According to public reports, systematic repairs were carried out on the reservoir in 2009 and 2023, with cumulative investment exceeding 400 million yuan.

But at 10 a. m. that day, the dam ripped open a gap 50 metres long in an instant, and floodwaters surged straight into downstream villages and vast stretches of farmland. Villages were instantly engulfed by metres-deep murky water. The ground and first floors of countless homes were completely submerged, while roads, power, and communications were cut off over wide areas. Many villages were reduced to islands cut off by water, with no contact with the outside world. A local villager interviewed by Phoenix TV said, The most terrifying part was that even after the dam released its water, the flood level did not recede.

At 11:30, Nanning’s flood control emergency response was upgraded from Level 3 to Level 1.

Hao Nan, founder of Zhuoming Rescue, noted that the volume and persistence of the rainfall in this round of extreme downpours across Guangxi were the key drivers behind the escalating damage. He drew a comparison with the ‘7·20’ catastrophic flood in Zhengzhou, Henan, still fresh in public memory, where conditions had been calm before a sudden burst of intense, short-duration rainfall. In this Guangxi event, by contrast, days of prolonged heavy rain had already saturated the soil and pushed river channels to the limit of their capacity. At the critical point where hydraulic infrastructure was on the verge of failure, the final hours delivered yet another wave of even more extreme rainfall. ‘This kind of rain is the most deadly—it’s like getting savaged in a boxing ring, already swaying and barely on your feet, when suddenly a few heavy punches land out of nowhere.’

Analysis shows that the typhoon followed an unusual track, and the heavy rainfall never subsided after it made landfall. According to statistics, during the 24-hour period from 08:00 on 5 July to 08:00 on 6 July, torrential to extreme rainfall struck southern and eastern Guangxi. Eight counties and districts—including Binyang County in Nanning, Qinnan District in Qinzhou, and Qintang District in Guigang—recorded rainfall exceeding 400 mm, with Luwei Town in Binyang County recording 713.3 mm.

◉ Daily rainfall map across Guangxi (08:00, 5 July 2026 – 08:00, 6 July 2026). Source: Meteorological Bureau of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The Pearl River Basin Authority revealed that in just two days since 4 July, 77 rivers across the Pearl River Basin—including the main stem of the Xi River and tributaries such as the Liu, Yu, and Gui Rivers—have already been hit by floods exceeding the alert level. On a single day alone, water levels on 40 small and medium rivers surpassed their highest on record.

Also under sustained rainfall, by 9 July at least 12 reservoirs in Hengzhou and the surrounding area had experienced dangerous conditions, including overtopping—flood levels rising above the design flood level, the point at which the structure can no longer reliably fulfil its flood-control function—as well as partial breaches and collapses. In addition to the nine reservoirs reported in the evening of 7 July, including Liulan Reservoir and Yunbiao Reservoir in Nanning and Guigang, Sancha Reservoir, Niangshui Reservoir, and Wangtian Pond near Hengzhou also issued flood release notices, with severe flooding downstream.

Hao Nan explained that a reservoir’s design flood level is a critical safety threshold. When dangerous conditions arise while the water level remains below that threshold, they are usually related to the quality of the structure itself. But once the water level breaks through and exceeds the capacity for which the structure was designed, the safety guarantee is no longer assured.

“We used to rely on a reservoir complex to handle a once-in-a-century flood, but that protective standard is no longer adequate. What was a “once-in-a-century” event may now occur every five to ten years. Extreme precipitation records are bound to be broken—not just here, but in other places too in the future,” Hao Nan asserted.

So what is to be done? One remark by a flood management expert left a lasting impression on him: “We need to shift from “cannot be flooded”—that is, dare not be flooded—to “unafraid of flooding.””

“Small floods are for people to contain; great floods must be allowed to flow,” another senior flood management expert explained to Foodthink, outlining the approach to standard-exceeding floods: when extreme rainfall triggers floods beyond design capacity, inundation is inevitable, but a series of resilience-enhancing measures can be taken—including improving the capacity to absorb impact, recover and rebuild quickly, and adapt to change—to strengthen risk management.

He went on to say that, at present, the water resources sector’s measures to address flood hazards are primarily ‘flood control,’ but risk prevention and resilience-building measures have extended beyond its remit. In adapting to climate change, the water resources department ‘has much work still to do.’

Agricultural Irrigation System

Built at great expense, now struck by this catastrophe

Not only water conservancy facilities but also agricultural irrigation systems must now factor in climate resilience. The flood triggered by extreme rainfall struck not only villages and farming households but also dealt a severe blow to the agricultural industrial system that Hengzhou has built around the Liuluan Irrigation District.

By the time Foodthink called, Liang Dong, a villager in Beicun Village, Hengzhou Town, Hengzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, had only just finished his day’s patrol and was finally sitting down to dinner. On 5 July, the day flooding struck Guangxi, he had not closed his eyes all night, helping to evacuate injured villagers.

The low-lying areas around Liang Dong’s home had standing water more than 3 metres deep, and floodwaters poured into the homes of many villagers. In his village of Beicun, two natural villages were affected, with over 100 households and more than 2,000 villagers impacted in total. The village’s principal crops—over 6,000 mu of jasmine and over 2,000 mu of rice—were all submerged. Liang Dong’s jasmine fields were among them.

◉ Floodwaters submerging jasmine fields, photographed by villagers in Chaoyang Dadong, Hengzhou Town, on 6 July. Image source: Southern Metropolis Daily

Construction on the Liulan Irrigation District modernisation upgrade project, with a total investment of RMB 382 million, broke ground at the end of 2023. In spring 2025, Hengzhou City was hit by a severe spring drought. During that period, reservoir water levels dropped sharply, leaving vast stretches of jasmine fields water-stressed and bud yields down. To safeguard the region’s flagship jasmine industry, local authorities accelerated construction, and large quantities of lined channel sections were brought into service in succession from the end of 2024 through 2025.

The project focuses on lining the full 60 km of main and branch canals and straightening their routes, in order to reduce water losses in transit and ensure that reservoir water can reach the flower fields rapidly during the dry season. According to the official approval document for the renovation project, the drainage ditches within the irrigation district were designed to a 5-year return period light rainfall standard, sufficient only to meet routine field drainage needs under normal light rain conditions. The renovation focused exclusively on agricultural irrigation throughout, with no flood-retention or flood-diversion facilities provided to cope with extreme, major flooding.

“There’s no saving them, it’s a complete sea of water. I feel so low — such good jasmine plants, all drowned.” Liang Dong said that jasmine plants submerged at this depth for a week might still be salvageable, but beyond a week it becomes critical, as root rot will kill the entire plant.

Jasmine is a perennial shrub that, with proper care, can be harvested continuously for over a decade. If the plants die, everything has to start over from scratch the following year.

For now, he can only focus on the relief effort. He doesn’t know what to do once the water recedes. “Once the disaster is over, what am I supposed to do?”

The roughly six mu of jasmine grown by Xie Shunxiong, a village committee member in Dahé Village, Hénghóu Town, was also almost entirely wiped out. Torrential rain had been falling continuously in the village since 4 July, for a full two days and two nights. Standing water reached two to three metres deep and had not receded by the night of the 9th.

Dahé Village lies close to the Yu River. By the time floodwaters reached the village along the channel, their force had already lessened, so Dahé was spared from being the hardest-hit area. Villagers’ homes were largely free of flooding, but the jasmine fields in the low-lying ground were almost entirely overwhelmed.

In the flat, low-lying flower fields along the Yu River, a backwater effect set in. Water in the farmland should normally drain into the river, but now the river level stood higher than the outlets, so the water could not flow out and even reversed, pooling in the fields with no way out. Xié Shùnxióng had no choice but to rally the villagers to start the pumps, but they made little difference—the water they pumped out still had nowhere to go. The rain kept falling, and all they could do was wait for it to stop.

Xié Shùnxióng’s double-petal jasmine has a long flowering season, with two peak periods each year—May to June and August to September. If the standing water receded in time and the plants survived, the jasmine could put out new shoots within a month or so, and they might yet catch the flowering season. If the root systems had died, they would have no option but to leave the village: either cutting papaya milk in nearby orchards that escaped the flood, or taking on odd jobs in factories in Guangdong.

In normal years, a single acre of jasmine could bring Xié Shùnxióng around 30,000 yuan in income. From this flood, he estimates his losses at nearly 100,000 yuan. Dahé Village has 1,500 households and 6,700 people in all; he said the average loss per household comes to about 80,000 yuan.

‘After the disaster, we will fight hard to secure subsidy policies,’ Xié Shùnxióng said. ‘You must put forward this suggestion—give the farmers some subsidies, please.’

As a village committee member, Xié Shùnxióng has been out every morning in the early hours these past few days, surveying the damage, registering the disaster situation for minimum-livelihood and five-guarantee households, checking the condition of bridges and roads—often not sitting down to a meal until eight or nine in the evening.

When the topic turned to the village, he paused for a long while. “The scene was beyond anything I could bear to describe. Even now, saying it still weighs on me. Over 6,000 people in my village were affected — I feel deeply ashamed.” After Xie Shunxiong finished, he hung up the phone in silence.

◉At 8:27 pm on 9 July, a dense cluster of help requests within the Nanning–Guigang area on the “Quick Help” mutual aid map mini-program. Source: interviewee

The Final Disaster That Broke the Flower Farmers

Zhongtuan Village‘s villager Zhong Luyan runs a jasmine ecological farm. She has felt that the weather in Hengzhou has been strangely off over the past two or three years, and it was last year that she felt it most acutely. “I always feel like there are so many typhoons now, they come so frequently, and the heavy rains last so much longer too—nothing like the natural weather of before.” In April last year, she witnessed something resembling a “sandstorm”—a sight she had never seen before in Hengzhou—fierce winds sweeping across the farmland, churning up a grey, hazy air.

“In the past, when summer got hot and a shower came, it would be over in ten or twenty minutes. Once the sun came out, we could go straight out and pick the flowers. It’s very different now. When a typhoon hits, we can’t harvest or pick flowers for several days,” she said.

Foodthink consulted experts on agricultural insurance and found that insurance products related to the jasmine industry mainly fall into two categories. The first is jasmine rainfall index insurance, with a coverage period running from the end of April to the end of October each year, spanning the jasmine flowering season. The policy stipulates that cumulative rainy days during the flowering period must exceed 95 before a claim can be triggered. The second is jasmine planting income insurance, under which compensation is payable if the actual total income per mu across the entire flowering period falls below the target income per mu specified in the policy.

The recent episode of concentrated heavy rainfall and flash flooding in Guangxi does not, by the literal terms of the policy, meet the meteorological threshold for a rainfall index insurance payout. Meanwhile, jasmine planting income insurance only saw its first policy issued in March this year, and even that initial policy covered a pilot area of just 10 mu — still in the early stages of small-scale trialling.

Several farmers told Foodthink that they were unaware of any insurance products related to the jasmine industry and had never purchased any.

Professor Yi Fujin of the School of Public Affairs at Zhejiang University has long researched agricultural policy and agricultural risk management. He noted: “Agricultural insurance in practice depends very heavily on the specifics of the insurance contract. It is not the case that every risk can be covered. If you were genuinely to include all risks, I imagine premiums would be very high as well.” He also emphasised that it is important to see how the local government communicates with insurers after a disaster occurs.

Against the backdrop of overcapacity the previous year and flower prices that had remained depressed for a long period, this flood, which struck squarely during peak flowering season, was salt in the wound for Hengzhou’s jasmine farmers.

Xie Shunxiong has been growing jasmine for more than 30 years. At the time, jasmine was a priority project in Hengzhou. Tea merchants from Fujian would bring tea to the area, where it was processed through the scenting process. In addition, Hengzhou’s jasmine was sold to other regions for use in potted plants, essential oils, and fragrances.

Between 2023 and 2024, the new-style tea beverage industry experienced rapid expansion, with a surge in products featuring jasmine tea bases directly driving up the price of fresh Hengzhou jasmine. Liang Dong told Foodthink that around 2023, the flower price suddenly jumped to over 40 yuan per jin. Each household could pick at most 70–80 jin a day, and at minimum 20–30 jin.

In Dahe Village, where Xie Shunxiong lives, household income ranges from a low of over 30,000 yuan to a high of more than 100,000 yuan per year. “Jasmine yields are high — as long as the price doesn’t drop below 10 yuan a jin, farmers won’t be out of pocket. Rice is only 3 yuan a jin, but a single jin of jasmine is worth three jin of rice.”

These prices drew many farmers into the market. They leased fields that had previously grown sugarcane and watermelon, converting them to jasmine in the hope of riding the wave. Liang Dong once considered expanding his own holdings, but those with the means to lease land and scale up quickly were mostly well-funded large growers. According to official statistics, jasmine planting area in Hengzhou City in 2024 covered 129,900 mu, with total fresh flower output of 109,200 tonnes. In 2025, publicly announced figures placed the planting area at 180,000 mu and annual fresh flower production at 130,000 tonnes.

Hengzhou has also developed a dedicated labour market for jasmine picking. Every blossom season, large numbers of seasonal pickers from Guizhou, Yunnan and other regions arrive in Hengzhou, renting rooms in various villages to work alongside local labourers on the intense fresh-flower harvest.

“Too many people are growing jasmine — it’s beyond market demand. Even the tea merchants have been struggling to sell their tea these past two years,” Liang Dong said. Starting in 2025, jasmine prices began to fall. The average price over the preceding two years had held at just over 20 yuan a jin, but by the start of this year it had dropped to an average of just over 10 yuan, falling to 5 or 6 yuan a jin on rainy days.

Jasmine prices in the first half of 2026 have not recovered to their 2024 peak, and the floods have disrupted what is the most important revenue-generating period of the year for jasmine farmers.

Beyond Jasmine, More Crops Devastated

The agricultural damage within the flood’s reach extended well beyond jasmine cultivation.

Local staple crops — rice and maize — were inundated over wide areas, and late-season rice seedlings already in the ground were washed away by the flood. Sugarcane, a core sugar crop in Guangxi, lay fallen in swathes with root systems waterlogged and rotting. Guangxi bananas, currently in peak bud-formation, also toppled and became waterlogged in the flood. Video Account creator ‘A Bao Speaks on Agriculture’ estimates that banana trees covering over 10,000 mu have been destroyed across Guangxi.

◉ Banana trees fallen over in contiguous patches. Image source: ‘A Bao Speaks on Agriculture’

Snake farming is also a distinctive local sector in Hengzhou that boosts farmer income, reaching peak annual output worth hundreds of millions of yuan. During this flood, approximately 800 to 900 snakes escaped from a snake farm in Dengxu Village, Yunbiao Town, Hengzhou. Snake farms in multiple areas were extensively submerged, and most of the farmed snakes drowned in their pens. Several pig farms were inundated; all 16,000 pigs at one farm in Yunbiao Town were swept away. Nineteen cattle drowned in a cattle shed in Hengzhou, with the individual farmer losing an estimated 200,000 yuan.

Aquaculture also suffered losses.

The village road in Liangshan Village, Wutang Town, Nanning, did not become passable until the afternoon of 6 July. When villager Qing Shoubai finally reached the village, he was met with utter devastation. Mud lay everywhere, making it hard to move forward. He has an eco-pond of fifteen or sixteen mu, which the day before had merged with his neighbour’s pond into one vast expanse of water. ‘I used to watch flood reports on the news and on TV and feel sorry for the people affected. But honestly, when it came to happening to me, the feeling was completely different. That helplessness is very hard to put into words.‘ He found that in that moment there was nothing he could do, and could only manage a rueful smile.

The pond had once been stocked with bighead carp, silver carp, grass carp, and other species. He had been farming them for about three years. Now the flood had scattered the fish into the nearby rivers, and he had no idea how many remained. On his way, he came across the farmer from the neighbouring pond, who looked even more exhausted and weathered than he did. That man’s pond was several times the size of Qing Shoubo’s, and the money he had poured into it had reached over 500,000.

◉At 2 a. m. on 8 July, power was finally restored to Qing Shoubai’s farm. Image source: interviewee

Qing Shoubai has been engaged in inland aquaculture since 2011. He considered himself no stranger to dealing with extreme weather. When the typhoon warning came out, he kept a close watch on its movements. In previous years during the heavy rain season, clearing the drainage outlets in time was enough to keep the water at bay. ‘This time it’s definitely not going to work, we won’t make it in time.’ He said, ‘Your experience means nothing against a once-in-a-century event.’

To keep his ecological aquaculture going and pay the fish pond rent on time, he has been borrowing from friends and relatives for years, barely scraping by. He finally saw a ray of hope in recent years, but this flood has pushed him further under.

Just before the call ended, he told Foodthink he was heading back to the fields that night. The water was gradually receding, but some people would take advantage of the standing water to shock-fish in secret, and he was going to stop them.