ABSTRACT
It was November 1995, and we had come to hike into the highland region known as Shennongjia, home to many prized rare plants and animals, including the legendary ye ren ('big foot") primate. These mountains, on the borders of Sichuan and Hubei provinces, rise to over 10,000 feet in sheer cliffs and steep ridges over rushing tributaries of the Yangtze River in the Three Gorges region. The Three Gorges dam would not have stopped the floods. The levees on the Jianghan Plain in Hubei Province had to be reinforced to hold back the surging waters which reached 28 meters above mean low at Wuhan, a historic high. Near Dongting Lake in Hunan Province, numerous villages were washed away, and 10,000 people were drowned. As a political entity independent of Sichuan Province, Chongqing now has considerable latitude to make reforms and arrangements according to "practicalities".
