Several hundred people in Gaoyang township, 250 kilometres upstream of the Three Gorges dam, are either refusing to move or have returned to their old location after being disappointed by conditions in the places to which they were moved.

Some farmers found there was no land for them in the new place, or that it was inferior to what they left behind, so they went back to work their old fields until those are submerged by the Three Gorges reservoir in 2006 or 2009. Other returnees, whose fields have already been inundated, are subsisting by growing vegetables on the hillsides above the reservoir. With their old homes already demolished, many are living in crude makeshift shelters.

These photographs were taken in July 2004.