Beijing Water Oral History SerieS
My Home and Water: A people’s Account
Yongding River in
Mentougou District
By Shi He
Translation by Madeleine Ross and Fang Li
Below is the sixth in a series of oral histories about Beijing water, as told to Shi He by 60-year-old
Wang Yongsen. Wang Yongsen is a farmer and longtime resident of a mountain village in Mentougou
District about 70 kilometres due west of downtown Beijing.
Wang Yongsen (60 years old)
Mentougou District, Yanchi Zhen (Goose Wing
Town), Henantai Cun (Henantai Village).
T
he people in our village originally came
from Yanchi Zhen (Goose Wing Town). I’ve
heard the older folks say that many years
ago, a man from Yanchi looked southward from
the north bank of the river, saw that this area of
land was pretty good and thinking that it could
be opened up, he crossed the Yongding River to
the southern bank to set up home on this plateau,
founding Henantai Village. He had five sons who
then had five families that have extended down to
the present day. We are the descendants of those
first five families.
There’s no water transportation on this river. I
don’t know what the situation is like further down
on the plain, but up here in this mountainous
area we can’t manage river transport – not even
rafts. Actually I should say that there is a little: if
anyone needs to build a house, they go into the
forest upstream of here, and float the tree trunks
down one by one. The way it’s done is to hammer
a ring into the log, fasten a rope onto it and then
walk ahead and lead it down. If it won’t flow down
with the current, then it has to be hauled. But
there’s no proper river transport network.
As for fish, there were plenty in the river when we
were young. There was never any variety in the
way they were prepared; they were just stewed,
and then sprinkled with a bit of salt. Carp were
the most plentiful, and there were also Crucian
carp and catfish. In those days no one went after
loach. It’s only in the last few years that they have
started fishing for loach in the bottom of rivers
and creeks. The biggest carp I’ve ever seen was 15
kilos and I’ve managed to catch three shrimp that
were over half a foot long. We used to use cloth
made out of very thin paper threads, but later
people began fishing by throwing chemicals in,
and almost as soon as the chemicals hit the water,
the fish would all come floating to the surface. I
haven’t been fishing for shrimp since they began
using chemicals. Now there are no shrimp to be
seen, even when chemicals are thrown in. People
still go fishing in the river, but they can only catch
tiny little carp like this, not even the length of the
palm of my hand.
There’s no comparison between the volume of
water in the river when I was young and the
volume today. You could even say that there’s
 Yongding River in Mentougou District | Beijing Water Oral History No. 6 | July 2008
no water anymore, it’s just about all dried up.
Upstream, the electric power station at Xiamaling
was built in the 1950s, and before power was
generated we used to go and visit the caves
there. They hadn’t built the Zhuwo Reservoir
above the power station at that stage so the water
came directly from the Guanting Reservoir in a
continuous flow. Guanting was the only reservoir
at the time. After the Zhuwo Reservoir and the
Xiamaling power station were built there wasn’t
much water left downstream in the river. Adding
that extra reservoir blocked the water. Now it’s
only before the rainy season each year when
there’s concern about the dam walls being able
to hold up, that a few hundred or thousand cubic
metres of water are released, and there’s a little
more water downstream. Normally we rely on
the power plant releasing a bit more water when
they’re generating electricity. For the first three or
four years they released water every two or three
days. But in the last two years, they’ve released
less, sometimes you don’t see water even once a
month, and when it comes, it’s much less than
before.
The main reason there is so little water is because
it doesn’t rain. It hasn’t poured with a saturating
rain around here for twenty years. What do I
mean by that? In these parts we say that, whether
it’s heavy or light rain, the mountain slopes get
deeply saturated until the water seeps out of
the mountains and flows for ten days or half a
month – that’s what we call properly wet. Standing
under the big Chinese scholar tree (Huaishu) at
the entrance to our village, if you look toward
the channel, that’s the only place where you’ll see
water coming out now, and when it does, that’s
when we consider the land to be soaking wet. I
haven’t seen water coming out like that for over
30 years. Water comes out in this channel of the
river after a cloudburst, but that doesn’t mean
anything. The year of the 2003 SARS epidemic
it happened once. If you ask me why it never
rains, I’d say it’s just like the story of the Fengxian
Prefecture in “Journey to the West.”1
1 In the story of “Journey to the West,” the
head of Fengxian prefecture behaved improperly so
2
Before 1980, corn, sorghum and soybeans were
planted on about 200 mu (1 mu = 1/15 hectares)
of village land on the mountain slopes. By then,
the rains were already not as good as in earlier
years, and it never rained much in one go. But at
least it rained a little, and we could still harvest
some crops. The flood plains near the river, where
wheat was planted, needed to be irrigated. But we
stopped irrigating after July or August, when the
wheat was harvested. It wasn’t like now, when
irrigation is needed all year long. On the dry areas
of the mountain, we can’t grow anything anymore,
there just isn’t enough rain. We could plant crops
but we wouldn’t have anything to harvest, so we’ve
simply stopped planting anything.
Originally, wheat was grown on the flood plain,
but when large areas of land began to be used for
forestry2, fruit trees were planted instead: apples
were grown on the higher plain while jujubes and
apricots were lower down, closer to the river. We
still had two water pumps in the village, and had
to spend money on electricity each year to pump
water to irrigate the flood plains, but then we were
only allowed to water the fruit trees on the flood
plain and we weren’t allowed to grow vegetables
any more. For example, cabbage required water
in autumn but all the fruit had been harvested
by then and didn’t need water, so the pumps had
stopped operating. With such a little scrap of
land, it wasn’t worth turning the pumps on even
once, so the cabbages died for lack of water. The
soybeans I planted last year never got harvested.
Now, all the vegetables we eat are store bought,
even though the vegetables we grew ourselves
were the tastiest and the sweetest, because they
were grown with farmyard manure and no
chemical fertilizers were put on them.
All the apricot trees on the hills died. And if
they didn’t die, any apricots on them are just
like dried-up little soybeans. Once upon a time
they were as big as a ten cent coin (1 inch), and
he was punished by the Jade Emperor with a drought
lasting many years. The rains did not return until the
head of the prefecture apologized to the Jade Emperor.
2 In 1998.
 Yongding River in Mentougou District | Beijing Water Oral History No. 6 | July 2008
as for the walnut trees, a few really flourished in
all of the creeks. Now all the walnut trees have
disappeared, and if there are any still alive, it’s
only the trunks that are left and all the branches
have died. Before 1980, we never took water with
us when we went up into the mountains because
all the little creeks had spring water bubbling out
of them. Now, wherever you go, you have to take
water as the creeks have all dried up.
Have a look at the houses in our village; all the
ones built above the row of Chinese scholar trees
(Huaishu) are old, and all the ones below the trees
are new homes – they have been built nearly to
the edge of the river. Who would have dared to
build there in earlier years? Now it hasn’t rained
for I don’t know how long, and on top of that
there are dams and reservoirs blocking the water
off upstream – Zhaitang, Weizishui, Zhuwo, and
Guanting reservoirs – so no matter how much it
rained the river wouldn’t rise, and that’s why the
area near the river is now covered in houses.
In the village we reckon that we use well water,
but in fact it’s water from theYongding River.
The Great Officials’ Well (Da guan jing), as it was
called, used to be the main well in the village, it’s
over there near the corner store. It was dug down
to the river water table, so it’s five metres deep,
and the water was winched out. But later when
there was less water in the river, the well dried
up. There was no choice but to dig another well
at the edge of the river, into which concrete pipes
were sunk. That well was also pretty shallow, and
water could be lifted out with just a carrying pole
and bucket. But, once we received running water,
the well was filled in. Our running water also
comes from a well dug next to the river, where it
is pumped to the surface and then put into a water
tank – it’s all water from the Yongding River.
However, the water we get now is dirty and not as
good as it used to be, because it encrusts things
with scale.
If the drought continues, even the people living
in mountainous areas will be totally parched. All
the villages these days are digging deep wells;
Yinma’an and Yanchi villages have already got
3
them. It’s because they have no water in Yinma’an,
and because the water they had in Yanchi didn’t
meet standards when tests were done. In his
earlier term of office, our previous village head
reported that the water in the Henantai was also
below standard, and that a well was needed. When
the new village head3 came into the position,
he didn’t bother to do anything about the issue.
Meanwhile, the Party secretary’s word is law. But
the Party secretary bought a house in Mentougou
town and, after retiring from office, he got on his
horse and raced off there. So the ordinary people
simply had nowhere to turn. I feel that we should
take advantage of the “build new socialist villages”
policy and grab the opportunity to get a deep well
dug. It would be underground water, and better
than river water.
However, the well in Yanchi is actually too deep,
so just getting a little water out of it costs a lot
in electricity. If it were just for drinking there
would be enough, but these days, with everyone
having baths, washing and scrubbing, people are
using too much water. But moving people who
live in the north down to the south wouldn’t be a
solution either.
Author’s Commentary
Henantai is a small village on the middle reaches
of the Yongding River in Mentougou District.
Wang Yongsen’s ancestors established the village
of Henantai in the Qing Dynasty, where they have
lived ever since. During the resistance against the
Japanese invasion of China, he and his father fled
to Hebei Province, returning to Henantai Village
in 1950.
We know from eyewitness accounts, that as the
climate has become drier in the last 30 years,
there has been a decrease in the amount of
water in the river, and an increase in pollution.
Henantai’s ecosystem as well as farmers’ living
3 Normally, in China’s rural villages, there is a
village head and a party boss: the former is in charge
of village business, while the latter is in charge of party
affairs. The latter usually has more power.
 Yongding River in Mentougou District | Beijing Water Oral History No. 6 | July 2008
conditions and ability to grow food have changed
a great deal. Trees that were economically
important in the area, such as apricots and
walnuts, have become unproductive to the point
that they are dying, dry farming is disappearing,
irrigated farming is prohibitively expensive, and
domestic water use, even just for drinking, is
in imminent crisis. The prospect of “having no
water to drink on the edge of a river”4 is a serious
problem.
People in a position to directly observe the
situation on the land are of the opinion that
decreasing rainfall is the main reason for the
lack of water, and meteorological data bears this
out. Since records started being kept, Beijing’s
annual average precipitation amounted to 630
millimetres a year, but after 2000 this dropped to
less than half that amount
But instead of contracting when rainfall
decreased, human activity and irrigated
agriculture along the Yongding River has
increased. According to 1995 statistics, 267 dams
of different sizes were built in the upper reaches
of the Yongding River between the 1950s and
the 1990s. The area of land under irrigation
expanded to 5.4 million mu of land. In addition, a
number of industries were developed, all of which
require a high level of water consumption, such
as mining, smelting, electricity generation and
chemical manufacturing. The water flowing into
the Guanting Reservoir decreased from nearly
2 billion cubic metres of water annually to 400
million cubic meters in the 1990s. In 2006, only
41 million cubic metres of water flowed into the
reservoir, and it stored only one hundred million
cubic metres of water – not even a tenth of what it
was designed to store. It is so dry that the bottom
of the reservoir is visible.
Right at the source of the Yongding River
at Shentou Springs, a 1.37 million kilowatt
hydroelectric power station has been built – the
4 Because of diminished flow or because the
water has been polluted. Here, the author is being
ironic.
Shentou Electricity Power Plant – transmitting
power to Beijing, Tianjin and Tangshan area.
Water from Shentou Springs is also used to wash
coal from the Pingshuo coalmine, China’s largest
open-cut mine. On top of that there are 17 electric
pumping stations in this area, irrigating more
than 40,000 hectares of agricultural land. Even in
Wang Yongsen’s mountain village of Henantai,
irrigation and tap water is provided.
As water volume in the Yongding River has
decreased, water quality has continuously
declined. A serious rise in the level of organic
matter and fertilizer runoff in the water is likely
the reason why people in Henantai report their
water “encrusts things with scale.” The water
pollution comes mainly from direct effluents
of household sewage and upstream industrial
wastewater. After 1997, water quality in the
Yongding River deteriorated to Grade 5, and
was no longer used as a source for Beijing’s
drinking water; it could only be used for industrial
purposes. Beijing’s Water Bureau announced
in 2007 that after several years of improved
management, water in the Yongding River had
generally become drinkable once again, but
Beijing still does not use water from Yongding
River as a source of potable water.
My Home and Water: A People‘s Account
Beijing, once famous for its sweet spring water
and clear-flowing rivers is now infamous for
its polluted canals and dried up riverbeds. My
Home and Water: A People‘s Account provides a
rare uncensored glimpse of life and water in the
ancient capital of Beijing and surrounding areas –
as told by longtime residents.
Translation, editing and online publication of
the series by Chinese author Dai Qing and Probe
International has been made possible by funding
from the Foundation Open Society Institute (Zug).
For more information, contact Probe International
at info@probeinternational.org