Downriver from the busy construction site that is the city of Chongqing, another city, Fuling, is being built on the bluffs along the Yangtze River. This new city is being built because most of old Fuling has been submerged under the rising waters of the new reservoir filling up behind the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest.
We had gone to Fuling to visit a new silk factory that is being financed by American capital raised on Wall Street, one of the first in this region to be listed on exchanges in the United States. The company wants to use the money to buy up antiquated state-owned silk manufacturing businesses and update the technology to meet the growing demand for silk. The factory not only gets tax breaks and discounts on water, electricity and gas from the local government, but also new high-rise housing for the workers and their families, many of whom are resettled from rural areas now flooded by the dam. The connection to U.S. investors was proudly, if imperfectly proclaimed in foot-high letters on the factory entrance; "Qiluo Textile Co., LTD (American OWNINVESPMENP)".
Kuang Dian Liang, the general manager of the silk enterprise, grew up in Fuling where his family had a food processing business. He took me down to a walkway below the sheer new embankment along the Yangtze River. It was another fifty feet down to the water where elderly fishermen cast into the grimy water. An old Buddhist temple on the mountaintop across the river loomed ethereally in the dense mist. Giant container ships materialized then vanished in the gloom. The reservoir is not yet full and will eventually bring the water line up to the walkway. Kuang gestured out over the brown waters as he spoke.
"My old factory is there, about a hundred meters under the water," Kuang said, pointing towards the far bank, barely visible through the murk. "But the government compensated me. They provided subsidies and allotted some land to me, so I’ve built a new business."
When I asked him what was distinctive about old Fuling, whose history dates back more than two thousand years, he responded unsentimentally.
"Nothing special, actually. The buildings of the underwater city in the past were traditional and old. Today’s buildings are much more beautiful and newer."
We strolled further down the riverbank and came to a long glass-covered tunnel leading down into the water. It turns out this is the entrance way to a new museum that leads to the White Crane Ridge, a sandstone strip that used to emerge every winter when the river level dropped. For more than a thousands years, the locals carved images of fish and notations about the annual water level. Now the new dam has submerged the landmark forever and the Chinese have responded to the international outcry over the loss of such an archaeological treasure by building this unlikely and ambitious underwater museum. Kuang seemed unimpressed by the historic value of White Crane Ridge but he hopes the new museum will cause tourists to cruise the Three Gorges to stop in Fuling.
Later, over lunch at a local hotel overlooking a sports stadium in the crowded new downtown, Kuang explained that his family business began more than ninety years ago but was confiscated after the Communist takeover in 1949. It was only in the late 1980’s, that ‘changed political policies’, as he put it, allowed the business to be re-established and for him to become a wealthy man.
As we talked, my camera crew and I gorged on more than a dozen dishes including our favorites, chiedze (eggplant) and mei shan tzu, which apparently translates as ‘ants on a rope’. After recoiling in horror the first time we heard this, we were relieved to find it didn’t mean this literally but was just some sort of small pork bits clinging to thin glass noodles. We also tried the Fuling specialty, a pickled radish sort of thing about which the less is said the better although even that was a welcome break from the fiery afflictions of Chongqing hotpot.
