The town of Shazhenxi, on the southern banks of the extended lake that the Yangtze River has become to the west of the Three Gorges Dam, is small and quiet. The main street of the town is a line of buildings constructed in the early 2000s before the old town sank beneath of the rising waters.

But there were not many of them, and in five minutes I was out of the town and walking along a ridge towards a large orange bridge over the Qing Gan (Green Dry) River. There were lots of kids with colorful backpacks squatting on and around the bridge. It was the last day of school before the October holiday and they were farm kids waiting to take a minivan or a motorbike up into the hills. They stay in school dormitories most of the year, and go back to the farms whenever they can.

I walked across the bridge and up into the mountains. The water level below was at 165 meters above sea level, so the bridge was maybe at 190 meters. The road took me up over 800 meters for long periods, with amazing views down into the valleys. This is the road to Badong, the most westerly town in Hubei province and one of the largest on the middle reaches of the Yangtze Gorges. The road was built in the early 1970s, I was told, and it may once have been paved. There were occasional stretches that suggested so. But it was basically a dirt track of stones, dust and ruts. Which suited me just fine because it meant it was quiet.

So I could walk along listening to the cicadas, chatting with the occasional peasant and snapping photos of the farmhouses. A quiet country road in the middle of China. I guess this is what I was looking for.

It was autumn, and the leaves were turning yellow and falling. But there was none of the bustle which marks autumn down on the plains where harvest time demands a sudden surge of activity – all hands on deck to cut, collect, dry and bag the grain. I had watched it in 2006 on the Hubei plain and in 2005 in western Zhejiang, and I can report that there is nothing to match the rich greens turning to yellow of ripening rice paddies, and the sights and smells of a harvest day on a late summer afternoon in the Chinese countryside.

Down below was the Qing Gan River, no longer a river but a part of the extended Three Gorges Reservoir. But it was definitely green – a slightly bluish deep green, with the river waters flushing through the gorge and holding back the brown sludge from the Yangtze.

The mountain sides along the Qing Gan River were cloaked in layer upon layer of houses, farms and terraced fields, all linked with long roads running along the entire length of the valley. The mountains were the same upturned slabs of earth, rising gradually up to a cliff, then plunging down to the start of the next slab. On some mountain sides, there were four roads stretching along the mountain at different altitudes. The road to Badong on the northern side of the valley was thankfully the top tier on the mountainside.

I came upon a small hut which was also a shop. I stopped buy some water. Sitting outside was an elderly man who gave the impression of being something other than a farmer. His name was Yin and I asked his profession.

“I am a teacher, retired,” he said. “I taught Chinese.”

“No wonder your Chinese is so good, then” I said. He laughed. “What school did you teach in?”

He pointed up the hill to a grey 2-storey building. “That one. But it closed in 1999.”

“A consequence of the birth control policy?”                       

“Precisely,” he said.

......

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