From Publishers Weekly
More than a million people will be displaced from towns along China's Yangtze River in a vastly complicated project begun decades ago to build the Three Gorges Dam. Incrementally, the water level will rise nearly 600 feet to form a reservoir by 2009, overflowing long-established communities and irreplaceable antiquities: Tang Dynasty rock engravings and the "Gorge of the Sword and Book upon the Art of War," where Zhuge Liang, before he became renowned for Mastering the Art of War, is said to have placed his book on military command. Chetham, a director of Harvard's prestigious Asia Center and an expert on the area, paints a pulsating picture of the great river, the countryside, the people and their occupations, the amazingly fluid political philosophies and the sheer endurance of all parties, past and present, involved with the overwhelming project. The panorama of China, the Three Gorges and the ever-present natural disasters and national turmoil emerges as Chetham employs a chiaroscuro-like technique, offering by turns visions of economic utopias with unprecedented generation of electrical power and darker tales in the history of a controversial undertaking. From timelines and interviews to musings of ancient poets, the story of the yielding of the Three Gorges to irrevocable change unfolds. "In China, not only does every rock and inlet have a story associated with it, but a god as well." With masterful scholarship and evocative prose, Chetham, who lived in China and understands this region intimately, chronicles myriad viewpoints. 23 pages of illustrations and b&w photos. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
What will be the world's largest hydroelectric dam is under construction in the remote Three Gorges area of China's Upper Yangtze River. Of the nearly 1500 towns that will be submerged when the project is complete, the author focuses on a handful that she knows well from her experiences as a river guide and lecturer. She describes their residents involved in their daily affairs-working, worshiping, getting by-even as the flood waters ineluctably rise around them. In some cases, communities that have existed for thousands of years, whose entire histories and cultures are centered on the river, that have survived flood, famine, and war, will be forced to uproot themselves forever. Against this backdrop, the author also recounts the broader controversies and political deal-making that went into the decision to build the dam. This book had to be written now because in just a few years these people and their world will be gone. Highly recommended for Chinese studies, travel, and ecological collections. [For more on the environmental, economic, and social consequences of this project, see also Dai Qing's The River Dragon Has Come!: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China's Yangtze River and Its People.-Ed.] Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"...fascinating details about what is being lost in the onrush of rising water..."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"...the content is a well-balanced mix of vignettes from real lives and their historical contexts."--Jo Lusby, City Weekend
"...it is from works such as this book that the memory of a lost culture will be preserved."--Andy Kegley, Times, Roanoke, VA
"Chetham's calm prose is an antidote to overheated journalistic reports...her writing comes alive."--David Armstrong, San Francisco Chronicle
"...a serious travel account-personal experiences, historically contexted...Recommended."--E.N. Anderson, Choice
"...a meticulously researched, emotionally charged account of China's uphill battle to erect the barricade."--David Johnson, The Asian Reporter
"Readable and informative, it's highly recommended."--Karin Glendenning, Chattanooga Free Press
"...a timely study of a condemned place."--Washington Post Book World
"A vivid last snapshot of the communities about to come to an end with the flooding of the Three Gorges. Chetham has an intimate understanding from many return visits, informed by her Chinese language and her knowledge of history, geography, society, and politics."
-- Ezra Vogel, research professor at the Fairbank Center, and former director of the Fairbank Center and Asia Center at Harvard.
"When the Three Gorges dam is built and its flood waters loosed, something very special will be lost-precious artifacts of a an ancient culture, a beauty that has awed everyone through the ages who has had the privilege to behold it, a way of life that has managed to cling even in a time of rapid change. What will be left is memory-in pictures, in people's minds, and, thank goodness, in books. Deirdre Chetham has been privileged to have spent more time on the Yangtze River than just about any other foreigner. We must all, Chinese and foreigner alike, thank her for preserving something of what will be lost and telling us what is was like for those who lived along the river when they had to face the inevitability of change. A wonderful account!" -- Anne Thurston, Associate Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
"Deirdre Chetham's evocative and informative portrait of a vanishing world will fascinate anyone who has wondered about the social and cultural implications of the Three Gorges Dam. The region's historical, archaeological, and cultural uniqueness extends to China's pre-history. Yet as Before the Deluge makes clear, even those who live in the towns being inundated have an imperfect grasp of how much is being lost. A poignant work, the significance of which will only increase after the deluge." --Judith Shapiro, author of Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China
Review
"...fascinating details about what is being lost in the onrush of rising water..."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"...the content is a well-balanced mix of vignettes from real lives and their historical contexts."--Jo Lusby, City Weekend
"...it is from works such as this book that the memory of a lost culture will be preserved."--Andy Kegley, Times, Roanoke, VA
"Chetham's calm prose is an antidote to overheated journalistic reports...her writing comes alive."--David Armstrong, San Francisco Chronicle
"...a serious travel account-personal experiences, historically contexted...Recommended."--E.N. Anderson, Choice
"...a meticulously researched, emotionally charged account of China's uphill battle to erect the barricade."--David Johnson, The Asian Reporter
"Readable and informative, it's highly recommended."--Karin Glendenning, Chattanooga Free Press
"...a timely study of a condemned place."--Washington Post Book World
"A vivid last snapshot of the communities about to come to an end with the flooding of the Three Gorges. Chetham has an intimate understanding from many return visits, informed by her Chinese language and her knowledge of history, geography, society, and politics."
-- Ezra Vogel, research professor at the Fairbank Center, and former director of the Fairbank Center and Asia Center at Harvard.
"When the Three Gorges dam is built and its flood waters loosed, something very special will be lost-precious artifacts of a an ancient culture, a beauty that has awed everyone through the ages who has had the privilege to behold it, a way of life that has managed to cling even in a time of rapid change. What will be left is memory-in pictures, in people's minds, and, thank goodness, in books. Deirdre Chetham has been privileged to have spent more time on the Yangtze River than just about any other foreigner. We must all, Chinese and foreigner alike, thank her for preserving something of what will be lost and telling us what is was like for those who lived along the river when they had to face the inevitability of change. A wonderful account!" -- Anne Thurston, Associate Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
"Deirdre Chetham's evocative and informative portrait of a vanishing world will fascinate anyone who has wondered about the social and cultural implications of the Three Gorges Dam. The region's historical, archaeological, and cultural uniqueness extends to China's pre-history. Yet as Before the Deluge makes clear, even those who live in the towns being inundated have an imperfect grasp of how much is being lost. A poignant work, the significance of which will only increase after the deluge." --Judith Shapiro, author of Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China
Review
"...fascinating details about what is being lost in the onrush of rising water..."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"...the content is a well-balanced mix of vignettes from real lives and their historical contexts."--Jo Lusby, City Weekend
"...it is from works such as this book that the memory of a lost culture will be preserved."--Andy Kegley, Times, Roanoke, VA
"Chetham's calm prose is an antidote to overheated journalistic reports...her writing comes alive."--David Armstrong, San Francisco Chronicle
"...a serious travel account-personal experiences, historically contexted...Recommended."--E.N. Anderson, Choice
"...a meticulously researched, emotionally charged account of China's uphill battle to erect the barricade."--David Johnson, The Asian Reporter
"Readable and informative, it's highly recommended."--Karin Glendenning, Chattanooga Free Press
"...a timely study of a condemned place."--Washington Post Book World
"A vivid last snapshot of the communities about to come to an end with the flooding of the Three Gorges. Chetham has an intimate understanding from many return visits, informed by her Chinese language and her knowledge of history, geography, society, and politics."
-- Ezra Vogel, research professor at the Fairbank Center, and former director of the Fairbank Center and Asia Center at Harvard.
"When the Three Gorges dam is built and its flood waters loosed, something very special will be lost-precious artifacts of a an ancient culture, a beauty that has awed everyone through the ages who has had the privilege to behold it, a way of life that has managed to cling even in a time of rapid change. What will be left is memory-in pictures, in people's minds, and, thank goodness, in books. Deirdre Chetham has been privileged to have spent more time on the Yangtze River than just about any other foreigner. We must all, Chinese and foreigner alike, thank her for preserving something of what will be lost and telling us what is was like for those who lived along the river when they had to face the inevitability of change. A wonderful account!" -- Anne Thurston, Associate Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
"Deirdre Chetham's evocative and informative portrait of a vanishing world will fascinate anyone who has wondered about the social and cultural implications of the Three Gorges Dam. The region's historical, archaeological, and cultural uniqueness extends to China's pre-history. Yet as Before the Deluge makes clear, even those who live in the towns being inundated have an imperfect grasp of how much is being lost. A poignant work, the significance of which will only increase after the deluge." --Judith Shapiro, author of Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China
Book Description
"I first sailed the Yangtze in 1983 on the Kun Lun, a foreign-leased cruise ship that went back and forth in seedy glamour between Shanghai and Chongqing. Over the next years, I made many trips along China's longest river, most often on its upper reaches, the section between western Hubei province and central Sichuan province in which the Three Gorges, a spectacular 120-mile stretch of mountains, ravines, and once deadly currents, are located. On board ship, I lectured to foreign tourists about Chinese history, shepherded them in and out of museums and factories, took them to hospitals, and dispatched them onward when necessary on stretchers and in urns. These long, leisurely, and contradictory trips, full of strange and fleeting intimacies, gave me my first introduction to river life."
So begins Deirdre Chetham's elegiac book about the towns along the banks of the Three Gorges area of the Yangtze River, written on the very eve of their destruction. The Yangtze flows 3,900 miles eastward from its source on the Tibetan-Qinghai plateau, where the Mekong and Salween also make their start, to Shanghai and the East China Sea. After great controversy, the Chinese government has begun construction of the world's largest hydroelectric dam in the Three Gorges section of the Yangtze, a place renowned for its beauty. For over two thousand years, the Yangtze has been the great transport route linking the coast with the west and southwest and providing irrigation for the farms that fed China. Once the dam is completed in 2009, the water level will rise as much as 350 feet in a hundred-mile stretch of the river. The water will submerge over a dozen large cities, almost 1,500 villages and towns, and innumerable historical and cultural sites. Over a million people are being moved, voluntarily or otherwise, altering not only their lives, but the lives of a multitude of others whose existence is intertwined with the river. A region already struggling with the impact of widespread rural migration is confronting the reality of having even fewer incentives to keep its youth in an area many wish to flee.
Before the Deluge captures a sense of the daily life, traditions, and history of the people who live along the Upper Yangtze's Three Gorges area. It chronicles the region's past and present with an eye on the disruption of an existing way of life. Perhaps most importantly, it captures a world that is rapidly vanishing under the rushing waters of one of the world's largest rivers.
About the Author
Deirdre Chetham has been a frequent traveler on the Yangtze River for almost twenty years. She has been the executive director of the Harvard University Asia Center since 1997, and until 2000 served concurrently as the executive director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. Prior to this, she spent a decade as a U.S. foreign service officer, with assignments in Beijing, East Berlin, and on the Burma desk in Washington D.C. Deirdre Chetham has been a contributor the National Geographic News Service, Gemini News Service in London, and Radio Netherlands International.
Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges FROM OUR EDITORS
When the Chinese government decided to construct the world's largest hydroelectric dam in the upper portion of the Yangtze River, a civilization was effectively lost. More than one million people, from fishermen to monks, will need to relocate their homes when the cities, towns, and villages of the mountainous region are flooded by rising waters after the dam is erected. Guide and lecturer Deirdre Chetham now immortalizes those communities in Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Upper Yangtze River, helping to carry on the history and the traditions that may be lost forever.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
A timely and compelling portrait of a world, quickly vanishing under the rising waters of the Yangtze River.
A fter great controversy, the Chinese government began construction of the world's largest hydroelectric dam in the Three Gorges section of theYangtze River. The dam will raise the river level hundreds of feet and inundate close to a thousand villages, cities, and towns, requiring the relocation of over a million people. Deirdre Chetham has been a guide and lecturer on theYangtze since 1982. Having worked among them, she knows about the lives of the people who live along its shores, from fishermen plying their trade to monks entering temples of worship, and captures a sense of their daily life here, while recording their traditions and history. In Before the Deluge, Deirdre Chetham paints a compelling portrait of the vanishing world of this remote but beautiful, mountainous region of the upper Yangtze River and documents a civilization that will, before long, cease to exist.
About the Author:
DEIRDRE CHETHAM concurrently serves as the Executive Director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and the Harvard University Asia Center. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
SYNOPSIS
A timely and compelling portrait of a world, quickly vanishing under the rising waters of the Yangtze River.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
More than a million people will be displaced from towns along China's Yangtze River in a vastly complicated project begun decades ago to build the Three Gorges Dam. Incrementally, the water level will rise nearly 600 feet to form a reservoir by 2009, overflowing long-established communities and irreplaceable antiquities: Tang Dynasty rock engravings and the "Gorge of the Sword and Book upon the Art of War," where Zhuge Liang, before he became renowned for Mastering the Art of War, is said to have placed his book on military command. Chetham, a director of Harvard's prestigious Asia Center and an expert on the area, paints a pulsating picture of the great river, the countryside, the people and their occupations, the amazingly fluid political philosophies and the sheer endurance of all parties, past and present, involved with the overwhelming project. The panorama of China, the Three Gorges and the ever-present natural disasters and national turmoil emerges as Chetham employs a chiaroscuro-like technique, offering by turns visions of economic utopias with unprecedented generation of electrical power and darker tales in the history of a controversial undertaking. From timelines and interviews to musings of ancient poets, the story of the yielding of the Three Gorges to irrevocable change unfolds. "In China, not only does every rock and inlet have a story associated with it, but a god as well." With masterful scholarship and evocative prose, Chetham, who lived in China and understands this region intimately, chronicles myriad viewpoints. 23 pages of illustrations and b&w photos. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
In 2003, China's Three Gorges Dam began filling a reservoir that by 2008 will be 360 miles long and 574 feet deep, the largest man-made body of water in the world. Some 1.2 million people will be forced to relocate, entire cities will be submerged, and large ships will be able to travel 1,700 miles into the Chinese interior. The dam is the world's largest, and it generates as much electricity as ten large nuclear or coal-fired power plants. At a cost of $22 billion, it was also the most expensive public-works project in Chinese history.
Chetham's interesting book describes the long history of the plan to dam the vital but turbulent Yangtze River. The idea was proposed as early as 1919 and received major impetus from the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the 1940s. Chetham bases her account on discussions she had with residents and local officials in the Yangtze valley. She focuses on the hopes and fears related to this grand project and on the practical challenges and early missteps of relocating so many people.
Library Journal
What will be the world's largest hydroelectric dam is under construction in the remote Three Gorges area of China's Upper Yangtze River. Of the nearly 1500 towns that will be submerged when the project is complete, the author focuses on a handful that she knows well from her experiences as a river guide and lecturer. She describes their residents involved in their daily affairs-working, worshiping, getting by-even as the flood waters ineluctably rise around them. In some cases, communities that have existed for thousands of years, whose entire histories and cultures are centered on the river, that have survived flood, famine, and war, will be forced to uproot themselves forever. Against this backdrop, the author also recounts the broader controversies and political deal-making that went into the decision to build the dam. This book had to be written now because in just a few years these people and their world will be gone. Highly recommended for Chinese studies, travel, and ecological collections. [For more on the environmental, economic, and social consequences of this project, see also Dai Qing's The River Dragon Has Come!: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China's Yangtze River and Its People.-Ed.] Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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