Moving mountains for water
Village leader wins acclaim for decades-long effort to resolve key problem in remote community
The villagers he led only had hand tools and explosives to build a waterway to realize their longcherished dream of bringing the precious resource to their mountainside homes. He is the stuff of legend but every bit real.
Huang Dafa is arguably an actual, modern incarnation of Yu Gong, a man who moved mountains in ancient Chinese mythology.
The saying Yu Gong yi shan — or “the old man moves mountains” — is a parable of persistence that seems foolhardy in the face of unimaginable odds.
Legend says two peaks separated his home from the nearest village. So, he decided to dig them away.
Another elderly man mocked him. Neighbors doubted him. But he responded that while his descendants could dig for generations, the mountains would not grow any higher. The gods were so moved by his determination that they moved the mountains for him.
Well, Huang enjoyed no such divine intervention. He had to rely on pure will.
Just waiting for a miracle would not work. The villagers he led in Caowangba in Zunyi, Guizhou province, ultimately took fate into their own hands and overcame unbelievable odds.
Droughts below puckered the soil and left residents with just enough drinking water. Since few crops could stand such a dry place, villagers could only plant corn and potatoes. They only enjoyed rice as a special treat during Spring Festival.
Huang found that Yebiao village not far away from Caowangba had water to spare.
So, he spent 36 years persuading, and then leading, villagers to chisel about 10 kilometers of a water channel into the vertical sides of three karst mountains in the hamlet of Caowangba.
Huang’s parents died when he was young, so he was raised by neighbors in the remote settlement.
He became a village leader in 1959. “I decided to bring three things to the villagers: water, electricity and a road,” said Huang, who is now age 86.
Before 1995, Caowangba was known as the poorest settlement in the area. For years, residents used to line up from morning until night to get just enough water for their most basic needs, from the last well.
“Other sources had dried up,” recalled Xu Zhou, the village’s deputy chief.
Huang began working on a water channel at age 12.
“There was a shortage of drinking water,” he explained. “There was a rule that nobody could take too much. If they did, someone else may not have any for breakfast. These conditions motivated us.”
People sometimes argued. “Forget irrigation. We had a 330-square-meter rice paddy that was parched to the point that you could put your foot in the cracks in the dry season. It was a serious problem. So, we started looking for a serious solution,” Huang recalled.
In his mind, doing nothing was not really an option.
Carving a channel across the cliffs seemed like more than an uphill battle. But the consequences of inaction were steeper than the vertical precipices the villagers had to reconfigure.
“If we can do something (for progress), we should,” Huang noted.
“We shouldn’t wait for things to happen. Dozens of years of my life could have passed without anything happening.”
So, he and the villagers decided to act, even if the odds were stacked against them.
Like the ancient Yu Gong, Huang grabbed a shovel and made the impossible possible.
The work was not only difficult but also dangerous.
Villagers forging the waterway sometimes had to hike to the top of the ascendable side of the mountains, tie themselves to trees and rappel down sheer cliff faces like a specialforces team, albeit one of farmers armed with only the most rudimentary tools.
Huang was the first to lash himself to a tree trunk at the top of a 300-meter-high cliff and take a leap of faith over the edge, he said.
“If I didn’t, nobody else (would have) dared.”
Even afterward, sometimes people were unwilling to take the risk, villager Huang Binchun recalled.
“We eventually persuaded some young men,” the 57-year-old said.
“The tasks were precarious and hard. Some nights, we slept in caves on the cliff. Everybody worked together. And we completed the channel.”
The villagers spent a decade boring more than 100 meters through one peak — in vain.
Their determination was abundant, but their understanding of irrigation was not. The water did not flow.
Some people then said Caowangba would never have enough water. But Huang Dafa did not give up.
The problem was that Huang Dafa and other villagers lacked technical understanding of constructing watersupply systems.
At age 53, Huang Dafa got the chance to study water-supply technology when he became a temporary worker at Fengxiang district’s water-management station, where he worked for three years.
He learned a lot about channel construction. So, he returned to Caowangba and asked the residents to try again. They agreed.
Huang raised money from the local government. In 1992, he led 200 people to begin digging the channel.
With steep drops below and high cliffs overhanging above in several sections, one wrong step during the work would mean the last.
But they persevered, enduring a lot of sacrifices, including staying away from families for extended periods of time.
Huang Dafa’s daughter and grandson passed away while he was on-site.
“He wasn’t home, even when my sister was on her deathbed,” recalled his 57-year-old son, Huang Binquan.
“The construction teams wouldn’t know how to proceed if he wasn’t there.”
Their work paid off in 1995 when
water gushed into Caowangba through a 7,200-meter main channel and 2,200 meters of branch ducts.
It has been named Dafa Channel in Huang Dafa’s honor.
People now enjoy ample drinking water. They can irrigate their fields and even grow rice. Huang Dafa helped the villagers expand the rice paddies to cover 48 hectares. Residents’ incomes have increased. Huang Dafa also led efforts to bring electricity and a paved road — projects that were completed in 1995.
Soon afterwards, villagers in neighboring mountainous settlements joined them, and together they formed a new village of Tuanjie, meaning solidarity.
Apart from that, the former secretary of the Party branch of Caowangba encouraged locals to support education, and helped build two schools — one in the 1960s and the other in the ’90s.
On June 29, Huang Dafa became one of 29 people to receive the July 1 Medal that the Communist Party of China Central Committee conferred to outstanding Party members.
The elderly man from a remote village deep in the mountains has become celebrated throughout the country and has been officially recognized as a “National Model Worker” and “Model of the Times”.
Despite his advanced age, Huang Dafa still thinks of ways to improve villagers’ lives. He continues to regularly inspect the channels to make sure they are operating well.
He also occasionally gives inspirational talks to young Party members.
In the end, it was not just water but also a rising quality of life that poured into the village. Electricity has brought a spiritual energy, and a new road enables villagers to move forward on the path to prosperity, changing their destinies.
In some ways, Huang’s true-life story is perhaps even more incredible than that of the fabled Yu Gong.