During the search and rescue process Liu Hongchun, the commander of the Fifth Division noticed a series of bright red blood tracks in the snow. He hollered to the soldiers in front:"Who's bleeding?" The soldiers were silent and continued their desperate work of shoveling away snow. Liu Hongchun followed the tracks and found a new recruit who was covering his nose with one hand and scraping away snow with all his might using the other. The blood was coming from a cut on his finger and drip-ping onto the ground. Liu Hongchun took hold of the soldier and told him to go back and rest. The soldier said:"But sir, please don't make me go back. Rescuing people is vital!" Liu Hongchun's eyes were wet, and he said lovingly, "Saving people is important, but you need to learn how to protect yourself too. If you're in a mess, how can you go and save others?"
Li Shilin, the leader of the Sixth Division was driving a bulldozer as he led his men onto the mountain face. Driving the bulldozer along the icy, frozen road was extremely dangerous. Once a bull-dozer driver himself, Li Shilin worried about the danger for the bulldozer drivers. He worked the bulldozer himself. Suddenly, a loud crash signaled that the wall of snow five or six meters tall had collapsed, caving in and burying Li Shilin and the bulldozer. The troops behind him called out:"Sir! Sir!" They shoveled away the snow in desperation to try and save the Squadron Leader. However, shortly afterwards Li Shilin miraculously managed to start up the bulldozer from inside the mound of snow, and left a long snow hole behind him.
At 5,008 meters above sea level, Dongda is the highest peak on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. The Commander of the Third Divi-sion Wang Zhenling led his troops by bulldozer from Zuogong County. It took them a day and a night to reach the northern slope of Dongda Mountain. There, they rescued two large buses with more than ninety people inside. The buses had set off three days before from Mangkang County and were heading to Changdu, but had been blocked by the snow on Dongda. Afterwards, they continued to search on the route towards the summit, and rescued another convoy.
In the middle of the night they reached the summit of Dongda. A taxi had overturned in a snowdrift one-meter-thick. There was the driver and two women inside. The three of them had been stranded in the snow for three days. The two women were sisters who had sold vegetables in Changdu. Several days earlier someone from the elder sister's village had taken her four year-old son out from Chengdu. When they reached Litang County the child had fallen ill with altitude sickness and the sisters, wild with agitation, had hired a taxi to go and pick him up. They had not considered the prospect of being stuck on the mountain on account of the snow. The elder sister cried:"Please take us down the mountain. My son is going to die, and I want to save him!" The mother was close to death and thought constantly of her son. Such strong maternal love shook all the men deeply.
Wang Zhenling consoled the woman:"Try and be calm. Of course we'll escort you down!" The bulldozer was carving a path ahead, and behind they were using metal wire to tow the taxi. After six hours of effort the soldiers and offcers finally got the sisters out of the area covered in snow. The final person rescued was Ciren, a Tibetan driver. Ciren was already in a critical unconscious state. The new recruit Jiang Sheng carried him unsteadily down the mountain, and before long he was so exhausted he collapsed on the ground. On the plain, four or five thousand meters above sea level, even walking empty-handed corresponded to carrying fifteen kilos on your back, let alone Ciren, who weighed forty-five kilos. After Jiang Sheng had collapsed the soldiers behind him carried Ciren. They each took turns and simply carried Ciren onto the rescue truck.
Up until this point, all of the people and vehicles trapped by snow had been freed from danger. During this blizzard the troops saved altogether 512 people.
The German Wilhelm Says: You Are the Pride of the Chinese Army!
Because the roads were blocked up, most of the 512 people saved ate and slept with the troops. The soldiers cleared out of the bunks in their barrack rooms to give to the people. They slept rough, wrapping their coats around them and sleeping in the ice-cold granary or in vehicles. The most precious items then were grain and vegetables. Normally the Sixth Division could only accom-modate 100 people, but suddenly it came to hold over 300 people.There was not much grain, and few vegetables left, but it seemed no diffculty could deter the people from eating their fill. The divi-sion gave away what they had to relieve the people. The cooking team steamed several large pots of mantou and rice every day for them to eat.
An old Tibetan mother turned the prayer wheel in her hand and repeated to herself over and over:"Yagudu, yagudu." (This means good). She said that before the Liberation forty people in their village starved to death during a blizzard. This time, not one had succumbed to hunger. Thanks must be given to the Commu-nist Party, and to the army! Because there were so many people the division's reserves of vegetables, husked rice and flour were eaten up very quickly before their eyes. The Party Branch of the division made a decision in order to stop the people starving: cut the rations of all the offcers and men by half, and give what is left over to the people. Every time they came to eat, all the men of the division except the few preparing the food pretended to be occu-pied with a duty, and would hide in the snow outside the barracks. When the people had finished eating they would return.
The people soon discovered this secret and demanded firmly that the soldiers and offcers eat first. The soldiers enjoined:"We're young and we can hold on." But the people would not be persuaded, and said that if the men weren't going to eat, then they wouldn't either. The two sides refused to budge. The five year-old son of Zhang Juan, who had come from Ya'an in Sichuan, was hungry. He saw the mantou and grabbed it to eat. Zhuang Juan was very angry and slapped her child. The child cried out and started to cry. This caused all the men and offcers, and the people, to cry too. One soldier said:"Miss, the boy's still young and he's just growing up. Won't you let him eat?" Zhang Juan said in tears:"If you won't eat, won't he follow your example? Without you, we'd all have died." The soldiers had no alternative but to bring in the plates, and everyone began eating when they did.
Later the flour stocks grew thinner and thinner and soon the firewood was used up too. Eventually there was not enough to steam a couple of mantou. There was only enough rice for each person to receive half a bowlful, and there were no vegetables. The children found it hard to swallow, and some of the younger ones began to cry. There were sixteen children in total who had been rescued. The division quietly made the decision to give the mantou and the salted vegetables to the children to eat, and to give the rice to the others. The soldiers of the division would wait until the people had eaten their fill and then start their own meals. The people said:"You still have duties to fulfill, and how can you do them when you've got no strength to face the emergency because you haven't eaten?" The soldiers refused to argue with the people, but simply hoisted the shovels on their shoulders and went out to the construction site.
Successive days of dealing with the emergency made the soldiers crippled with exhaustion. They stumbled about as they walked. They were so tired! The people saw them and felt their pain. They were worried for the soldiers, but they couldn't think of any way to help them, and so they demanded to be able to go with them to the construction site to help. The squadron leader decided that the site was too dangerous, and so he persuaded them with all his might to desist. He posted sentries to guard the gate of the barracks to stop the people from entering the dangerous road. In spite of this, however, a few people ran onto the road secretly and proceeded to scrape away snow and break ice with the soldiers to clear it. Luo Sang, the ticket inspector of the coach that had been rescued on Anjiula Mountain, shoveled away snow behind the bulldozer and could not be persuaded to return back. He helped the soldiers clear over twenty kilometers of road. After the men of the maintenance teams and the detachment had struggled for two weeks of sleepless nights, the road was finally clear.
A hundred or so of the people who had been rescued were to return home. However, their progress was slow and heavy, and they could not bear to leave them. They remembered with longing the warm barracks and the soldiers who had saved their lives. They were able to return home, but the soldiers remained in that world of ice and snow to safeguard that "lifeline" road. The meeting of the two groups had been a blessing of fate, and their parting was grievous. They shook hands and wept as they gazed on each other, and remained speechless, much to my surprise. The Tibetans among them expressed their gratitude in the only way that they could, which was to hang a snow-white hada around each of the soldiers' necks, and then drape one around the bulldozer that had "fought" the snowy road for them.
In the Fifth Division, a German painter couple, Wilhelm and Mary, and their two children Jone and Adam were living with the division after being rescued. They had been travelling in Tibet. Several days earlier they had been trapped on Anjiula Moun-tain, when the search and rescue team led by Commander Huang Ming had arrived just in time to afford them a narrow escape. The soldiers gave them their own cotton mattresses and quilts and endured the icy temperature over thirty degrees below. They curled up in the compartments of vehicles to sleep. In the middle of the night the two children broke out in a fever from having contracted a cold. The medic of the division treated them swiftly and the children recovered well. They stayed with the division for twelve days. When Wilhelm was about to leave he left a letter of thanks that read:"My wife, children and I thank you enormously for having saved our family. You are as virtuous as the snowy mountain is beautiful, and my children now love the men of the Chinese army as much as they love the great snowy peaks. You are the pride of the Chinese army! God bless you!"
Chapter 4 The Great Landslide at Yigong
Just as the Fourth Detachment were waging a struggle of resis-tance against the snow in an effort to alleviate the trauma, another, bigger disaster occurred in the Yigong Area of the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. It was about 8:05 in the evening on the ninth of April 2000, at 94 degrees eastern longitude and 30.14 degrees north latitude. The tea factory in Yigong was shrouded in the misty darkness of the evening, and a bitter wind blew gently. There was no sound, save for the occasional calls of herders gath-ering together their cattle or the cries of birds. The great mountain seemed perfectly quiet and secluded.
Gesang, a retired worker from a tea manufacturing plant was returning home on the road. Suddenly before his eyes a bright blaze of flame soared into the sky. The earth rocked dangerously, and then immediately afterwards swelled a great boom of thunder. He was frightened into a daze and stood rooted to the ground. He had no idea what was happening. The first word that came into his head as a response was: earthquake. However, he soon understood that it wasn't an earthquake, but the first large-scale landslide to take place on the mountain. He saw the snowy peaks of Layongcuo, which towered into the clouds, tumbling down with a crash. The soaring blaze and the ear-splitting noise were emanating from the fractured mountainside. He suddenly awoke from his stupor, scrambled to his feet and ran towards home. This was indeed the first landslide to happen within the borders of China for almost a century, and the world's third mountain landslide!
It seemed as if Layongcuo was being cloven apart by heavenly craftsman. A mudslide 300,000,000 cubic meters long rolled down half of the mountain in an overwhelming wave, gushing towards the Yigong Zangbu River, where it formed a natural dam 2,500 meters both in length and width and over eighty meters in height. This blockage cut off the flow of the river and formed a large natural lake.
The climate had grown warmer and the monsoon had arrived. When the ice and snow had melted it mixed with the rainwater and poured out into the natural lake. The lake began to rise at a rate of about one meter every day, and the Yigong area became a land of swamps. Once the river water overflowed, the newly-formed dam collapsed, and in an instant the property and lives of the four thousand Tibetans living in the two villages nearby, their three factories, the Sichuan-Tibet Highway some dozen li down-stream, the equipment installed by the army by the riverside, the military bridges and the many hamlets in the vicinity would be completely swamped.
Yigong, Yigong
The entire nation was quaking at the landslide in Yigong. The Central Party Committee, the State Council and the Central Mili-tary Committee responded to the emergency by deploying units to the area to serve as disaster relief. The unit closest to the site of the emergency was the Armed Police Detachment tasked with recon-structing and repairing the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and ensuring it remained open. They were the first to arrive at the site and began the relief work immediately and with urgency, working to save the people trapped there. A team of experts from the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters into the snow-affected plateau and inspected the site. Afterwards they concluded that the relief work should be conducted upon engineering principles; the plan was to carve out a canal basin in the shape of a "V" in the body of the embankment to draw out the water and dredge the flow from the river, as quickly as could be done. This was meant to stop the dam bursting from the pressure building up over it.
Which detachment could shoulder this heavy responsibility?
Everybody from the Central Committee to the people on the scene, from the army and civilians, looked to the two units of the Armed Police with eyes of faith. The two units were the Trans-port Unit and the Water and Electricity Unit. These two units were engineers who had transferred from the Infrastructure Engi-neering Corps. They had many years of experience performing construction work on the plateau and had built outstanding feats of architecture. Yang Chuantang, the Commander in Chief of the Yigong Relief Headquarters and the Vice-Chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, stated: "To have two engineering units taking the lead, and to have a group of PLA men working together to wage this struggle, will mean that the relief mission has ample skilled people and enough machinery support."
Liu Genshui, the Head of the Political Department of the First Division of the Armed Police Transport Corps, was on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway performing relief work and battling against the snow. When he heard the reports of a huge landslide in Yigong, he had a visceral feeling that it was more severe than the blizzard that had happened earlier. He instructed the main-tenance unit decisively: quickly withdraw a group of men from the snow mission and send them to the relief work struggle in Yigong, which is more dangerous. Make sure that the Sichuan-Tibet Highway is open twenty-four hours a day, immediately and without reservations or conditions. Get rid of any obstacles that block it so that the units and vehicles can get to the relief area." In the Headquarters of the Armed Police and Transport Organization in Beijing, the two generals Director Shi Zhaoqian and Commissar Lu Linyuan endured a sleepless night with the incumbent members of the Standing Committee, as they faced the growing golden-brown patch of earth on the map, and researched plans for deploying troops and conducting relief work.
On the morning of the next day the Headquarters sent down a message to the relief work units. All the offcers and soldiers of the Second Detachment, the Third Detachment and the Mainte-nance Detachment were to immediately prepare to engage in the struggle to carry out the relief work. They were to spare no effort to ensure that the Sichuan-Tibet Highway was open, persist stub-bornly until the relief work was finished, and they would not be withdrawn until total victory was achieved. Later the Major General Yu Guowei, the Deputy-Director of Headquarters, Chen Zhenyou, the Commissar of the First Division, Xu Fenglin, the Deputy Commissar, and the Chief of Staff, Wang Zhiting, flew to Lhasa. On the third day they went post-haste to the relief site at Yigong. Under the integrated deployment strategy of the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters and the on-site Headquarters, the two police units began to mobilize machinery and troops with alacrity from along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, the Tibetan territory and various construction locales from all over China. They performed this mobilization as fast as they could in order to build up reserves for the Yigong area.
Lan Jiankang, the head of the Second Transport Unit, received an emergency relief order on the twenty-eighth of April. That night he mustered the troops and machinery; twelve hours later, he led the machine corps and the relief teams as they set off, vast and mighty, for Yigong. On the morning of the First of May Inter-national Labor Holiday, Lan Jiankang was the first person to reach the relief site. It was fitting, because he had once been appraised by the Transport Unit as a "labor hero", he had twice received second class citations for merit, four times received third class citations, and had been a representative at the Fourteenth Party Congress. Yang Chuantang paid tribute to him:"The Transport Unit moves with incredible speed!"
The sixteen technical operators mustered in Guangxi took buses, switched trains, and hopped on planes, rushing madly to arrive in Chengdu. But rain came down in torrents and the plane to Tibet was delayed. Time waits for no man-what was to be done? The division stationed in Chengdu immediately sent a special vehicle to take the operators to Chongqing, from where they would fly to Lhasa. On the second, these sixteen men arrived in Yigong. On the third, the two bulldozers of the Third Detachment arrived. On the fourth, the offcers and soldiers from the Inner Mongolian construction sites arrived. The Transport Police and Water and Electricity Headquar-ters spread the news of the secretary Fang Jinyong, who had signed up in the unit's wide mobilization efforts. Afterwards he said to me:"That was nothing more or less than a death trip!"
Fang Jinyong said that when the driver of a bulldozer sent from Golmud crossed a breach in the Tangula Mountain, over 5,000 meters high, his eyes became red and swollen, his mouth and nose began to bleed, and he could not stop vomiting. He could not hold down food for three days and could not sleep. It seemed that this vicious circle was making him thinner, but he simply ground his teeth and drove the bulldozer on to the designated place. On the section of road over 600 kilometers long between Lhasa and Yigong the road often collapsed, and the soldiers then leapt from the vehicle and shifted stones to clear away the blockage. A delay could mean several hours. Some sections of the road had become riverbeds where water flowed down, gushing. When you entered the section it was agonizingly slow. The road in some parts was extremely narrow, and only one vehicle could fit through. When a vehicle came in the opposite direction, the other vehicle had to stop and wait. Waiting could take a very long time. Crossing Sejila Mountain, the flurrying snowflakes spread everywhere and you could only see the road for ten meters around you. The whole road was made up of snowdrifts and solid ice, and when you drove over it, the vehicle would rock on its rear wheels, like ice-skating. It was extremely dangerous. In the curved, winding and narrow natural clefts of the Parlung the mountains were high and the valleys were deep, with precipitous cliff faces that hung out over drops of hundreds of meters. The valleys were three hundred and thirty meters deep. There were nine simple steel bridges that could only bear a weight of up to twenty tons; much of the machinery and equipment weighed over thirty tons.
Some roads were too narrow around bends, and the large vehi-cles could not get round them. There were many instances where the vehicles and the people inside them almost perished. Some temporary local drivers were hired, and they struck out resolutely to the halfway point. When they got to the Parlung cleft, they simply did not dare to advance further. All the machinery and men in two of the detachments taking part in the relief mission arrived at the relief site within one short week.
Breaking Open the Belly of the Beast
The natural dam formed by the enormous landslide on the moun-tain was like a colossal monster lying horizontally across the surface of the Yigong Zangbu River. Once the dam collapsed the damage was incalculable. The State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters ordered the detachment to dig out a channel 2,500 meters long, 150 meters wide and 20 meters deep to drain away the flow within thirty days. This project required digging out and hauling away over 1,500,000 square meters of earth and rock.
At ten o'clock on the morning of the third of May in the midst of a faint drizzle, an oath-taking rally for the project was held by the side of the Yigong Zangbu River. During the meeting the military ensign fluttered in the wind and the machinery boomed. The Armed Police in their dazzling uniforms raised up streamers and banners, on which were written slogans like, "Youth Recon-naissance Team", "Party Reconnaissance Team" and "Forever the sincere protectors of the people and the Party. We vow unto death to finish this task of relieving Yigong!" With fluttering hearts, they lined up in regiment.
The battle to rescue Yigong then broke out.
The relief site stretched along an eighteen-mile portion of unsophisticated highway that wound tortuously from Tongmai to Yigong. The warriors of the relief unit pursued two kilome-ters from the site, until there was no trace of the road. Squadron Leader Lan Jiankang of the search and rescue team waved his arm:"Wang Qinghe and Liu Jiang, you two drive the bulldozers and go in front; the others follow behind the machinery!" The crash of the bulldozers, of iron spades and shovels dashing against the solid rock and the boom of the quarrying reverberated in the white clouds of the mountain. In just five hours, the soldiers and offcers had built two temporary bridges, and had blasted apart and trans-ported 30,000 square meters of earth and rock. Where there was no road they dug out a pathway that led to the dam.
The relief army began the struggle at the Yigong dam. The sun was blazing hot, and the temperature on the ground reached forty-five degrees. The operating rooms of the machinery became as sultry as bamboo steamers, almost suffocating the men inside. The machinery operators sweated rivers, and constantly gulped down water from streams and cooled boiled water, but the water they drank evaporated immediately, and they were still thirsty. Every man knocked back at least six or seven kilograms of water every day, but urinated very infrequently. On the fifteenth of May, over half of the construction work was completed. The water in the river was rising by 1.5 meters every day, and mudslides had ravaged the construction site several times. To prepare for inunda-tions, the site headquarters decided to open a makeshift road four kilometers long on the winding path on the western slope of the dam where the slope exceeded seventy degrees.
Who would take on this thorny challenge? Of course, it was Lan Jiankang's team! Lan Jiankang forged ahead, leading several bull-dozers. His firm and determined soldiers followed behind. Lan Jiankang stood at the head of his men and made repeated gestures:"Left, right, back, forward. . ." Thistles and brambles were cut aside, huge stones were moved asunder, and ravines were cleared level. In just thirty-six hours the team completed the task.