a river runs through it

Beside the entrance hangs

a silk sign in Chinese calligraphy. On the far wall a picture of Mao. There is little in the way of furniture: a broken chair, a bed, part of an engine. On a far table, a photograph, a pair of glasses, a bottle of Coca-Cola and vegetables covered in a dirty cloth. Chinese reeds nestle on the floor. A door closes at the back on to a secluded courtyard. I can see the shadow of an old man holding an urn. There is also salt. Two months ago, along a clay road, he carried the coffin of his wife to a small cemetery. When the flood comes she will be buried forever. How I would love to have no memory, he says.

When construction of the Three Gorges Dam is completed, Li Haitao, who lives in the small town of Wuxia, Wushan County, will lose his wife for eternity to the Yangtze River and the world's biggest hydro-electric project. She will rest on the riverbed with the force of

an unimaginable weight of water pressure squeezing her remains into the earth. Li, who is 71, must wait until the Dam is completed in 2009 (the first electricity will be generated in 2003) before leaving his sorrows to the turbines, the generators, the concrete and the silence. But the Chinese are born patient. From the moment they are born they learn to endure. Only now the waiting has changed

its shape.

Li Haitao, who suffers from diabetes, sits among the detritus waiting to die by memory. He is gentle and petite and in his company I feel an overweight, unlovely giant. He is telling me about his life and the life that will come after the floodgates of the dam are opened.

His family have lived in this region since the Ming dynasty, which ended more than 350 years ago. His voice is full of anger, foreboding and resignation. ''I don't know when I'll be moved or where they will move me. My daughter is here and her son also. We will all have to move.'' Li has to take what the state will give him. ''There is no bargaining.'' It takes

a lifetime for poor people to accumulate their possessions. Always, for reasons beyond them, everything they hold is gone. But Li Haitao won't waste his time weeping over anything easy like furniture. He worries, he says, only for the future of his family. And how he will no longer be able to tend his wife's grave.

The aim of The Three Gorges dam is to harness the enormous power of the flooding and turn its raw power into electrical energy. It is a daunting task of almost misguided Stalinist folly. Yet for many it may one day stand as a triumph of China's ability to reinvent itself and, at the same time, remodel nature.

The foundations of the dam are currently being gouged from the granite at Sandouping Village, Hubei Province, 27 miles upstream from Yichang city proper, where a curtain of concrete will eventually stare out across the valley over 600 feet high and more than a mile wide. In November 1997 the Yangtze river (known to most Chinese as Chang Jiang - Long River) was finally diverted by the massive 70-metre high Gezhouba Dam, which arrested the Yangtze's flow, forcing all shipping up and down the gorges to pass through one of its three ship locks, in order to begin the work on the main wall of the Three Gorges Dam. China's most ambitious project since the Great Wall will swallow up cities, farms and ancient canyons of the Yangtze and displace nearly two million people in its quest to create a 360-mile long reservoir, which aims to bring prosperity to the inner sanctum of China's mainland.

The might of the dam - and it will be mighty - will be capable of generating over 18,000 megawatts of electricity, the equivalent of 18 nuclear power plants. By 2009, it will be the world's biggest hydropower plant in terms of total capacity and annual average generating capacity. There will be 26 generators with a per-unit generating capacity of 700,000 kw installed on the left and right banks of the river. Overall installed capacity is estimated at 18.2 million kw, and annual generating capacity 84.68 billion kwh, or about one-seventh of China's total in 1992.

The project began in 1993 and is expected to cost 203.9 billion yuan (#16bn) by the time it is completed early in the next century. But critics of the project expect the final figure to be far greater, reaching as high as #50bn. A great deal of money has already been lost to corrupt officials in local towns and villages. And in the rush to advance economically and politically, say critics, the environment will be neglected. Those who argue against the dam say it will be an unmitigated environmental disaster, no more than a symbolic project of magnitude and stature and a memorial to Mao and Maoism that will last forever, in order to revive the bold image of China.

There are fears that the dam will create a huge muddy quagmire when the water behind the dam silts up. Over 500 million tons of sediment each year is carried by the Yangtze, causing some experts to calculate that in around 70 years shipping could grind to a halt. The environmental changes could also bring the final death of the Baiji river dolphin, which is currently on the Chinese government's endangered species list. Even without the dam their chances of survival diminish daily.

Around 44 billion yuan (#3.5bn) has been raised so far for the construction of the dam. The Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corp has been seeking new funding channels, and in the first six months of this year raised four billion yuan from corporate bonds, interbank loans and foreign loans. Major Chinese banks have also given support. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Construction Bank of China (CBC) and Bank of China recently signed loan agreements. From 1999 to 2003, ICBC and CBC will each provide four billion yuan in commercial loans.

Last month, somewhat surprisingly, Li Peng, chairman of the Chinese legislature and the leader most closely associated with the dam, told officials in the project area they must ''recognise the importance'' to the project of relocating people displaced by it. Already 178,000 have been relocated and another 450,000 are slated to go before the first electricity is generated in 2003.

The rest have to be moved by 2009, when the project's 360-mile-long reservoir is filled. Environmental and human rights activists have opposed the dam, saying its size and

cost are wasteful and its impact on human lives and the Yangtze River valley's rich environment and cultural relics too devastating. But their criticisms have been rarely heard in China, where the communist government controls all news media.

Li, a Soviet-trained hydropower engineer, was instrumental in gaining approval for the project during his 10 years as premier. While his comments illustrate leadership worries that a mishandling of the project could harm the Communist Party's image, they do not signify a re-evaluation of government support. ''The Three Gorges project is striking proof that socialism can focus all of its resources on grand accomplishments,'' Li was quoted as telling officials during a tour of the dam in Hubei province. Li's successor as premier, pragmatic Zhu Rongji, made the most public official criticism of the project while touring the area in May. He cited concerns about environmental degradation, poor engineering and corrupt officials frittering away relocation funds. Zhu appealed for more efforts to find work and homes for the displaced and appeared to move away from initial plans to resettle people

as close to their original homes as possible.

For many, the Three Gorges Dam could prove to be a visionary power, controlling the area's furious flooding (last year floods on the lower Yangtze displaced more than a million people from their homes), or ambition of catastrophic proportions. When you look into the Yangtze River and imagine The Three Gorges Dam, you can almost see the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, in which tens of millions starved; the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which decimated intellectual life; the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which brought China to the edge of chaos; and the bloody suppression of the student protests round Tiananmen Square a decade ago. But the answers to the riddle of this particular Chinese enigma, lie less in the facts and figures than in the voices of the people, like Li Haitao, who will be displaced as a result of this mammoth undertaking. To appreciate the impact of the project, myself

and photographer Angela Catlin embarked on an eight-day, 400 mile trip down the Yangtze from Yichang to Chongqing, covering the navigable reaches where the new reservoir will be. Along the way, we took in The Lesser Three Gorges, the Mini Three Gorges and numerous cities and towns. We spoke with boatmen, farmers, teachers, factory workers, miners and a handful of government officials, whose opinions were as forthright as they were diverse. Yet, while there has been sustained criticism of the government's plans by private individuals and even the normally docile delegates to the National People's Congress, there has also been an outbreak of enthusiasm such as that expressed by labourer Nan Hangzou, one of the 60,000 workers assembled in Sandouping, where the carcass of the dam is under construction.

Above the din and spectacle of countless massive cranes and lifting machines and fleets of giant dumper trucks, Hangzou points to the craters and long tunnels of dust that were once granite and earth, before exclaiming: ''It is an honour to be working on this project. All the Chinese workers feel the same. It is important that we build it for the rest of the country and the people of China. It will inspire confidence in the Chinese people.''

Sandouping is an improbable place, where trucks get stuck in the mud and workers recite the party line with stoic regularity. Patriotism and devotion is evident here, on a scale

as grand as the landscape. Perceptions of the positive aspects of the dam enjoy almost limitless elasticity in a place where workers are paid a few dollars a day and the air hammers with the noise of almost forced indenture. The workers look tired, eaten with the weather and as small as locusts. Another worker, Han (which means drought), an ebullient and unforgettably decent man, says ''The dam will be good for the new generation, for my children. They will grow up in new houses provided by the government and there will be new jobs.''

The dream of taming the Yangtze and harnessing its prolific energy first surfaced in 1919, when an ambitious blueprint Grand Tactics to Build up the Country was proposed by Sun Yatsen. Since then, the project has been cursed with controversy and delays, while the war in the 1930s and 1940s ended any of the initial proposed plans. In the 1950s Chairman Mao gave it his blessing, however, the subsequent debate was so strong that another two decades of research were agreed upon before there was any further movement. Final approval arrived in 1992.

The completion of the Gezhouba ''coffer dam'' in 1997 at Sandpouping forced the river southwards through a man-made channel, to allow the work on the new dam which is making its way, like a dragon's tail, across the valley. In total, around two million people will be displaced as the reservoir fills behind the dam. It is planned that those who live in some 1,400 mostly rural towns and villages will eventually be resettled on sites chosen by the government, either near the reservoir or elsewhere in China. It is expected that around 1,600 enterprises will also disappear. The mountains between Yichang and Chongqing are 3000-feet tall, bursting with limestone and sandstone that stretches from as far away as the Tibetan hills. Occasionally, the hills reveal a granite, a reminder of the power that supports the waterway for more than 3000 miles. It is the harnessing of this almost volcanic energy

in the dam-impounded river that the Chinese government is desperate to utilise. This potential energy will be for sale as electrical power. The site of The Three Gorges nestles almost in the geographic middle of the country making it the nearest river-filled ravine to the eastern part of China. This means that it possesses, in economic terms, the potential for delivering an enormous amount of power to the industrial sector.

We left Sandouping and boarded a double-decked ferry, stuffed with bodies, at Yichang, before heading 170 kilometres upstream to Wushan. Yichang sits at the eastern mouth of the gorges and is populated by over 400,000 people. Historically, it is a trans-shipment point for cargo up and down the river. It is also the starting point for our trip along the difficult and distant place that is the Yangtze. We leave the polluted industrial landscape of Yichang, where life gathers at the edge of the city, and try to imagine the form that this peculiarly treacherous river will take.

Up ahead is an armada of little boats, sampans, barges and ferries, all navigating the geography, cartography and history of the ancient waterway. We cut through the dirty brown water, floating styrofoam, discarded bottles, empty cartons of noodles and a battery of floating boxes. We drift through hairpin bends, a massif of limestone and the occasional statue of Buddha, buried in the mountain, half covered by years of overgrown foliage.

One of the greatest fears over the building of the dam is that thousands of historical sites, temples and relics, similar to this one, are expected to be lost to the great flood. Too little is being done too late to save many of these precious aspects of Chinese history and, only recently, Chinese archaeologists broke their silence surrounding the debate over the tomb of water. The most famous sites, such as Baidecheng temple, the low-water record tablets near Fuling, and the City of Ghosts in Fengdu will be relocated or safeguarded, but many hundreds of other sites will be lost. Many of these sites and relics - more than 1,200 have already been discovered by the Natural Cultural Relics Bureau - date back to the Ming dynasty, the Han dynasty and a handful of Stone Age sites approximately

30-50,000 years old. From a dig outside Yunyang artifacts, including a 1,700-year-old government seal fashioned from mud, have been recovered and saved.

Our first port of call is Wushan, a town which has existed since the latter part of the Shang Dynasty (c.1600-1027BC), where we are to transfer to a smaller boat for a trip around the Lesser Three Gorges and the Mini Gorges. The faith of the Buddha had reached China, during the first century, and a large number of temples were built here, though most have been destroyed over the years. As we pull into the village I can hear a voice from a loudspeaker - the China People's Broadcasting Station - spouting whatever propaganda is the order of the day. The old, two-storeyed houses hang with dried, medicinal herbs while street dentists with pedal-driven drills ply their trade. The roads in Wushan are ruts worn into existence by thousands of years of procession by wheelbarrows, mule carts, labourers and livestock. The air is brutal with smog. Pigs, ducks, chickens and bare-bottomed children scamper

through the muddy streets.

Old women eat their evening bowls of rice. At the far end of one street, near a work site, a billiard table sits for workers who like to shoot pool at the end of the day. The restaurants here, and the shops, brim with food. Every conceivable part of an animal - intestines, entrails, stomach, head, liver, neck, feet - are used. It's not just rivers, nor

fields, that nourish communities. An old man and a child are blackening some dead lumps of animal flesh with an industrial -sized blow-torch. I almost clap at the absurdity of it all.

Wushan is lined with concrete, thatched-roof dwellings and iron latticework. Every rural town in China looks like Wushan. From its bursting main street stuffed with boggle-eyed humanity to the occasional mighty building that doubles as the local government office and market area, Wushan breathes Chinese life. There is rotting masonry and some kind of greenery sprouting from the windows along the front of the town. The people look like they are rusting. Barefooted men, with broad shoulders and bamboo sticks - bangbang-jun, the ''stick army'' porters - run around the town fetching and carrying loads for visitors and locals alike. Wushan bustles with car horns and bicycles. Standing here it is easier to close your eyes and become part of the splendid misery. Granted, there are less choices, but a great deal more company.

Huo Nei sits barefooted in a small room off an alleyway in the middle of the town. He is unsure about speaking to me. Our translator, Liu Cong, an 18-year-old English student, is quietly relaying questions to him. What does he think about the dam? What will happen to his family? Where will he find work? ''You want to know too much about where we live,'' he said. ''Why are you here?'' It takes about 15 minutes to convince him to tell us what he thinks about the dam project. Finally, he relents. He built his house for his family 23 years ago and he knows it will disappear along with the rest of the houses in the area.

''I am a farmer and I work a few miles from here. But it is becoming harder to work the farm because everything is becoming industrialised. Money is supposed to come to us to change things, to help us, but what have we seen? I will tell you. Nothing.'' He shows me his empty hands. ''Nothing.'' Nei says he has been promised factory work but it will take him some time to adapt to such changes. ''I have no skills for the factory, no training. All I know is how to work in the fields. But there will be no fields when this dam comes. It is no good to me.'' He stares at the floor. ''How do I even know where the factory will be? They have told us nothing.'' Will the dam be good for the next generation, the children of China, I ask? He muses for a while. ''Perhaps. I am not so sure. Maybe for the children of factory owners.''

The lesser Three Gorges is in Wushan county, on the lower reaches of the Daning River, which is the largest tributary of the Three Gorges. This astonishingly beautiful area has only been open to foreign tourism since 1985 and remains largely unspoiled. Its length reaches 50km along sheer cliffs and steep mountains, which rise on either side. The gorges are often shrouded in mist, but today the sun is drifting over the colourful flowers that line its banks. It is playing with the mandarin ducks, the fish, the reefs, the stones and the monkeys that perch by its edge. Thousand-year-old suspended coffins, graves of the Han dynasty and ancient plank walkways line the route to the Mini Three Gorges and to the almost forgotten town of Da Chang.

The historical atmosphere is its own stirring story. The dams' water will rise here also, defining a new river and a new China that the leaders promise as a symbol of power for the new generation. History, that often shrouded muse, lives here. The small boat rocks. We are hemmed on all sides.

Stalactites in strange shapes and various sizes have formed on both banks of the river. Horse Returning to Mountain, Monkey Fishing in the Air, Dragon Returning to Cave and the Goddess of Mercy Seated on Lotus Platform are some of the ancient formations that will disappear under the water. Further on, the Mini Three Gorges takes small boat loads of tourists along the lower reach of the Madu River.

We travel in long, low, wooden sampans, propelled by the sheer strength of powerful boatmen. As tourism expands and develops, these areas have become as popular as anywhere on the Yangtze. Yet at a time when scholars have increasingly recognised that the Three Gorges region represents one of the true seats of Chinese civilisation - where history and myth cross each other's path - the prospect of rising waters may submerge the mountains and bury the shores. After eight hours, the boat returns us to Wushan and we continue our journey to Fungjie. On the higher ground the length of the Yangtze, new cities are rising like concrete forests, replacing their ancient predecessors along the riverbanks. The stillness is broken only by passing boats and birds. Throughout the world, the giant rivers have been stopped by monstrous dams like the one being built at Sandouping - the Danube, the Nile, the

Ganges and the Itaipu Dam on the Brazilian-Paraguay border. All these have succumbed to the vision of the engineer and the demands of nature and trade.

When it is completed, over 100 million cubic metres of soil and rock will have been ripped from the ground, 29 million cubic metres of landfill deposited and an incredible 27 million cubic metres of concrete set, across the Yangtze's unruly nature. It is a feat of engineering that will prove virtually impossible to outdo for at least half a century.

Not since the mythical Shang emperor Yu quelled 12 capricious water dragons, preventing vast flooding, has the river been under control. The increased water levels of up to 120 metres through the Three Gorges will submerge most of what we can see before us. I can only imagine the scene if the dam were ever to break up under its mammoth weight (the dam has been criticised for its potential to be attacked by nuclear weapons, but the Chinese government insists that if it comes under nuclear attack, the steep, twisting valleys will be able to contain the 40 billion cubic metres of water gushing forth. ''No major damage is expected if a dam-breaking occurs'').

On the deck of the rusting, blue ferry Zhang Dong, a businessman who works for a telecommunications company, in the bustling city of Chongqing, is telling me that China is changing and that the rural poor must learn to adapt to that change or they will be left behind. China is trying to replace old farms, dirty industries with clean new companies. China, he says, needs the Three Gorges Dam. He surveys the river around him. ''Small town construction is a major strategy adopted by the central government to improve the rural economy. The development of small new towns, as a result of the dam, will help to promote industrialisation of farm work. Small towns are collection and distribution centres for commodities, which help fuel the

service industry.''

Dressed in smart grey trousers and blue jacket, Dong represents new China. He believes that the hydropower system will have environmental benefits too. It could lessen China's reliance on fossil fuels. China relies on its enormous deposits of high-sulphur coal for three-quarters of its supply of electricity. As a result of this, the air in China is, unenviably, among the worst in the world. Pulmonary disease accounts for a quarter of all deaths in China.

The advantages of hydropower over fossil fuels, he says, are enormous and will benefit the country. When the dam is up and running its harnessed energy will initially supply the coastal areas, while locals still rely on coal.

If the dam generates even half the benefits claimed, supporters and, perhaps grudgingly, detractors will claim it as a triumph for China. Dong heads for his berth, leaving myself and Angela to stare at the river, which is growing huge and swollen around us. The channel buoys wink conspiratorially. Behind us, in Sandouping, the antlike figures of infantry workers are still digging, setting, blasting

and excavating, while the evening mist rises in the gray night. The boat trawls the

slow river to Fengjie. China remains an unmistakable emotion.

Michael Tierney and Angela Catlin flew from London to Beijin, Yichang and Chongqing courtesy of Air China. For flight details contact 0171 630 0919/7678 They stayed in Beijing courtesy of Mr Jacob Chan at the Capital Hotel, part of the Meritus Hotels and Resorts. For hotel reservations contact 01491 637537.

next week: The Chinese government has promised financial investment to resettle the poor, but can the money make its way past corrupt provincial officials?