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Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
New buildings tower over the Wu River.
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Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
LANGUAGE LEARNING
Students practice foreign-language lessons by reciting aloud at a sports field on their new campus. In 1996, when Peter Hessler began teaching in Fuling, China had only three million college students; today there are more than 23 million. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
GHOST BUILDING
Most of the old campus of Fuling Teachers College, including the gymnasium, is unused and awaiting sale on the private market. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
DANCE CLASS
Students practice at Yangtze Normal University. Enrollment has risen from 2,000 to 17,000 since the mid-1990s. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
COUNTRY LIFE
Around hilly Fuling the average farmer earns less than a third as much as the average city resident. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
RIVERSIDE SPIRAL
A new wraparound ramp allows drivers to carefully negotiate downtown Fuling’s steep hills. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
ENGINEERING FEAT
The Three Gorges Dam, which stretches for nearly a mile and a half, is the largest concrete structure on Earth—five times as wide as the Hoover Dam. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
RESCUED FISH
Tourists pose beside a stone fish carved into the White Crane Ridge by Zhang Shifan, a local official, in 1813. The fish was removed before completion of the Three Gorges Dam to save it from being washed away. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
NIGHT SERVES
Children play table tennis and badminton in a park beside Fuling’s new sports stadium. These neighborhoods high above the Yangtze are growing as rural migrants continue to arrive in Fuling. In the mid-1990s only 30 percent of the region’s population lived in the city proper, a figure expected to reach almost 70 percent by 2015. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
RISING AFFLUENCE
In Fuling, the Chongqing Department Store caters to the growing class of urban consumers. -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
NEW CASTING GROUND
On a part of the Yangtze where the water level has risen almost 400 feet, Huang Zongguo and his father, Huang Yizhang, fish for yellow catfish. Beneath their net lies the former site of Jiaohuazi Valley, once known for its rich soil. “People used to joke that there were no bachelors in Jiaohuazi,” Huang remembers. “Even the poorest man could afford a wife.” -
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
FLOATING FAMILY
Huang Zongguo’s children play on the family fishing boat near Wushan. Like many rural Chinese, Huang violated the nation’s planned-birth policy and paid a fine of $1,500. “We still have the old thinking,” he says. “Two are better than one.” -
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