Record of Shuangquan Reservoir
Leaving east from Sangzhi county town and going upstream along the Youshui River for about 40 kilometers, you can see a nearly 100-meter-high river-blocking dam standing majestically. Walking from the foot of the dam up to its top, the vast and open Shuangquan Reservoir unfolds before your eyes: its water is as green as mung beans and clear enough to drink. When a breeze passes, ripples keep spreading. Taking a boat for a tour on the lake makes you feel even more that the peaks on both banks are embraced in verdant green, and the lake water sparkles with light, with scenery as beautiful as a painting, refreshing the heart and mind. According to a brief introduction to relevant water conservancy projects in Sangzhi...
Leaving east from Sangzhi county town and going upstream along the Youshui River for about 40 kilometers, you can see a nearly 100-meter-high river-blocking dam standing majestically. Walking from the foot of the dam up to its top, the vast and open Shuangquan Reservoir unfolds before your eyes: its water is as green as mung beans and clear enough to drink. When a breeze passes, ripples keep spreading. Taking a boat for a tour on the lake makes you feel even more that the peaks on both banks are embraced in verdant green, and the lake water sparkles with light, with scenery as beautiful as a painting, refreshing the heart and mind.
According to a brief introduction to relevant water conservancy projects in Sangzhi, Shuangquan Reservoir is a medium-sized reservoir. Construction began in 1965, and in 1968 the dam was completed and water storage began. Its storage capacity is 10.8 million cubic meters, its controllable flow area is 23 square kilometers, and it irrigates up to 30,000 mu of farmland.
Since its establishment, Shuangquan Reservoir has undoubtedly played a great role in irrigation, power generation, and flood peak regulation, but the price paid in various aspects for building this dam can also be said to have been very great. When the reservoir was first being built, I was only 11 years old. My father once took me to the construction site to take part in a ten-thousand-person battle. The scene of carrying rocks and hauling earth, with people crowded shoulder to shoulder and a tremendous hustle and bustle, is still unforgettable to me today. At that time, the loudspeakers set up by the command headquarters constantly recited Mao Zedong's poem "Water Melody": "Just drank Changsha water, and again ate Wuchang fish. Crossing the Yangtze for thousands of miles, I survey the wide sky of Chu. Let the wind blow and waves beat, better than idly strolling in a courtyard... A bridge flies north and south, and the natural moat becomes a thoroughfare. We will cut off the clouds and rain of Wushan, and a calm lake will appear in the high gorge. The Goddess should be unharmed, and will surely marvel at the changed world." At the time, I did not really understand the meaning of this poem repeatedly read over the broadcast. Only later did I gradually understand that building Shuangquan Reservoir was also to implement the great leader's "supreme instruction"; to make "a calm lake appear in the high gorge." In those years, everything was done in a rush and by one-size-fits-all methods. As long as it was the leader's "supreme instruction," even artistic poetry had to be carried out to the letter, regardless of whether it suited reality. Originally, this poem was conceived by Chairman Mao in 1956 while swimming in the Yangtze, in response to the idea of building the Three Gorges Dam. The content of the poem is full of romantic sentiment. Later, when this poem was publicly published, people across the country were greatly inspired and encouraged. Soon, the Great Leap Forward movement arrived, and the construction of large-scale steelmaking and large-scale dams and reservoirs began to proceed with great momentum everywhere. Sangzhi's Shuangquan Reservoir was also prepared under this broad historical background. After 1965, the reservoir officially began construction. At that time, construction used very little machinery; building the dam relied entirely on human-wave tactics. The county drew labor according to assigned tasks and implemented militarized organizational management. Each commune organized a battalion, led by a militia battalion commander. During major surges, almost all commune members had to go and join the battle, and they even had to bring their own grain. After several hard winters and springs of struggle, by 1968 the reservoir dam was finally completed and began storing water. But the two irrigation canals along the river, each hundreds of li long, still had to be built. After that, the county again drew part of the labor force from each production team according to population proportions to build canals at the construction site for long periods. Because the water channels also had to cross mountains, ridges, streams, and rivers, and the geology along the route was complex, with many culverts and inverted siphon pipes, construction was extremely slow. As a result, canal building became a marathon project, lasting more than ten years from beginning to end.
The long-term construction of the reservoir project brought enormous pressure to the production and life of each production team. The drawing away of millions of labor days caused production in many production teams to be delayed far too much, and building this reservoir failed to bring any practical benefits to the commune members of these production teams. Every year during the lean season, many commune members even had trouble getting enough to eat. The long-term laborers drawn to build the canals and land had a daily subsidy of only one jin of grain and 3 jiao, but this was only enough to maintain basic living and could not provide any help to their families. Even more lamentable is that during more than ten years of reservoir construction, because large numbers of laborers gathered together and needed firewood for cooking, the forest vegetation along more than a hundred li of the canal line was almost completely cut down. After the reservoir was completed, the river channel downstream also often dried up with little water, the riverbed was exposed, and fish in the river became rare. Because the forests were destroyed, whenever it rained even slightly, mud and sand from the bare mountains all poured down, and the Youshui River became completely muddy.
In the 1980s, after the rural household contract responsibility system was implemented, the system changed, and the era of "large in scale and highly collective" finally passed never to return. By this time, Shuangquan Reservoir had also been fully completed. The mountain forests along the Youshui River began to receive attention and were afforested, and the ecological environment along the river gradually improved.
Now, several decades later, looking back at this tall Shuangquan Reservoir on the Youshui River, it can be said that building this project back then had both advantages and disadvantages, both gains and losses. The experience and lessons within it are truly worth later generations carefully drawing on.