For the elders of the Huai River basin, there’s a shared memory: the era of bahe (river-digging). It was a time marked by stirring pride and harsh struggle. As a child, I often heard my father recounting his days spent digging the rivers—Xinbian River, Xugang QueLing, Huaihong Xinhe, Shuanggou QueLing… Recently, many readers and teachers in the comments section have also recalled early river-digging efforts—Cihuai Xinhe, Pinggang QueLing, and more. Each familiar place name strings together fragments of a grueling yet stirring epoch. Whether it was the excavation of the Xinbian River, the Cihuai River, or the Huaihong River, all were part of the fight to permanently tame the Huai River’s floods. Back then, before bulldozers and heavy machines existed, river dredging relied entirely on humans. At each excavation site, red flags fluttered and crowds gathered. Workers chanted labor rhythms as they shovelled, dug, and carried soil—painting grand scenes of humanity’s triumph over nature. Each person, lost in the collective surge, worked with fervor and resolve.
Yet the reality was undeniably hard. Hunger was constant. In an era when white flour buns were unreachable, workers subsisted on coarse grains, living perpetually half-starved. Village elders recall that at the Xugang QueLing site, breakfasts and dinners were made of mashed sweet potatoes and corn porridge; midday meals were steamed buns made from sweet potato flour mixed with regular flour, with radish shreds and salty beans as condiments. The constant hunger sapped strength; efficiency plummeted. As the project advanced, some sites attempted to improve meals—for instance, the Chen Zhuang commune’s water conservancy brigade decreed, “eat as much as you want until full.” Food teams in the rear ground flour in bulk, delivering it to sites via tractor. This helped, but overall diets still lacked protein and fat, leading to widespread malnutrition and edema.
When the Great Famine struck, rice rations dwindled to merely one jin (about 500 grams) per person per day, and meals were “one dry, two thin.” Countless laborers collapsed from hunger and exhaustion at the work sites.
Shelter, too, offered little comfort. There were no worker dormitories—only makeshift shacks. Using bamboo poles and reed mats, they built crude lean-tos lined with straw and husk mats. Dozens slept in communal bunks, often awakened by fellow sleepers’ movements in the night. Others fashioned huts with grass-thatch, wheat straw, and purlins, but these were damp and cold; with flimsy bedding, backs ached, and rheumatism set in. Rainy seasons turned spaces into puddles. Media of the time reported that after a downpour, “water slowly seeped in, soaking the straw mats with damp chill—sleep was impossible.” In Shuanggou’s bitter winters, laborers wore frozen cotton jackets, breath forming ice on their eyebrows, yet during labor stripped to shirts, sweat coursing down into their waistbands. On night watch, toes were warmed by sacred quotations used as insoles. In sum: winters were bone-chilling, summers swarmed with bugs, and some camps lacked fixed shelter. Workers merely “cut trees, set up small huts in wastelands, laid straw on the ground, and stayed and labored at the site.”
The labor itself was backbreaking—overloading bodies at their limit. Workers contended with miracles of geology and a lack of tools. At Xugang’s gravel strata, the earth was as hard as stone. Workers used steel claws or two people stomping on a shovel to penetrate it. By day’s end, hands blistered; when they burst, handles were bloodied. Media accounts from Dangshan record workers battling black sandy loam with 60-kg shovels, working in pairs and calling out “Ha-yo! Ha-yo!” in rhythm to lift clods. At Shuanggou, laborers worked more than 12 hours a day, hauling heavy carts uphill from the riverbed—over a li (half a kilometer) per trip; the strongest made sixteen trips a day.
Digging low drains (taolonggou) was the most grueling task of all: in frigid winter, barefoot workers waded through icy, shifting sands, digging trenches. Their legs went numb; many later suffered chronic arthritis. Shanghai youth volunteers stationed at Xugang recalled that even in temperatures below -10°C, workers labored drenched in sweat—clothing froze and was rarely changed; lice infested bodies, producing unbearable itching.
The history of bahe is monumental in its scope and sorrowful in its depth—nothing less than an epic of human river taming by sheer will. Words are too feeble to capture even a fraction of that monumental era. Though history books forgot their names, every person involved was a hero.
