Tiny skull necklaces, elaborate wooden pipes, hideous sunglasses and shimmering polished stones are all offered at prices to be negotiated. But Shi Bao Zhai seems mostly like a village left undisturbed. No concrete towers decay, no honking traffic snarls, and crowding only materializes when river tour boats disgorge hundreds of yacking, sweating and shoving tourists on holiday from the empire's farther reaches. These rugby scrums trundle through the streets in identical baseball caps, following a bullhorn-wielding leader, buying up kitsch, mobbing the pagoda and then moving on. Shi Bao Zhai then returns to its sleepy charms by the Yangtze's shores.
Men carry almost anything on their backs to make a living.
But change is coming to the village's doorstep. When the Three Gorges Dam blocks the Yangtze's flow, the resulting man-made lake will slowly flood Shi Bao Zhai. The tile-roofed houses, the carefully tended farmland, the men bearing tourists' sedan chairs up winding stairs to the temple gates, will inexorably drown. Estimates of the number of people to be displaced by the Three Gorges Dam range from 1.2 million to nearly 2 million. Construction has already begun on higher ground as new villages and town are created from scratch.