Before the Deluge

Chetham's elegiac book about the towns along the banks of the Three Gorges area of the Yangtze River was written on the very eve of their destruction. After great controversy, the Chinese government has begun construction of the world's largest hydroelectric dam in the Three Gorges section of the Yangtze. Once the dam is completed in 2009, the water level will rise as much as 350 feet and over a dozen large cities, almost 1,500 villages and towns, and innumerable historical and cultural sites, will be submerged. 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. 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 and captures a world that is rapidly vanishing under the rushing waters of one of the world's largest rivers.