Few outsiders can imagine what was forever changed when the waters of the Yangtze met the irresistible barrier of the largest dam ever built, at Three Gorges in China. Banked behind a two-kilometre long and 175 metre high wall, the river transformed within hours into a giant artificial lake, submerging settlements in the broad, fertile valleys between and beyond the gorges. By 2006, thirteen cities, 400 towns and 1,352 villages were submerged, displacing an estimated 1.4 million people. The Vanishing: Altered Landscapes and Displaced Lives on the Yangtze River began in 1999, as millions of lives were about to be reshaped, and concluded in the Spring of 2003, when the flooding began.

Covering 700 kilometres from Chongqing to Sandouping where the dam was being constructed, I wandered through virtual ghost towns, each undergoing a different transition, but all faced with the same inevitable and destructive end. Some still thrived, determined to live their last days with the core of the community still intact before destruction began. Other cities, already in the process of displacement, were inhabited by a handful of families, a shell of what they once had been. The inhabitants in these towns often carried a look of lonely despair, their surroundings a semblance of what was once home.

The Vanishing: Altered Landscapes and Displaced Lives on the Yangtze River highlights the gradual yet monumental transformation of these once vibrant places into ‘submerged’ communities in which the Three Gorges Dam may appear as a pretext for any immense change during industrial and economic development.