The Three Gorges Reservoir is a transformed landscape whose submerged communities, displaced inhabitants, and eventual catastrophic flooding make it one of the war’s most consequential places. It begins as a symbol of state-directed modernization and inherited memory, becomes a dangerous zone of illicit recovery and infection, and ends as the source of a brown-water disaster that carries the destruction of the old order toward the East China Sea.

Construction and Displacement

The reservoir was created when the Three Gorges Dam was completed and its waters began to rise. Much of Old Dachang, a settlement dating to the period of the Three Kingdoms, was dismantled brick by brick and rebuilt on higher ground. The old town had contained farms, houses, and trees believed to be centuries old, but its preservation became deeply ironic: the rebuilt settlement was converted into a national historic museum, allowing former residents to see their saved home only as tourists.

That displacement left memory embedded in place names. A remote, officially nameless hamlet adopted the name New Dachang, not because it was still the old town, but because the name preserved a connection to the heritage that the reservoir had submerged. The reservoir therefore carries two histories at once: the official history of monumental construction and the private history of people whose homes were preserved as artifacts while their lived community disappeared.

The First Outbreak at New Dachang

The reservoir becomes an early site of infection through “moon fishing,” the illegal practice of diving among the ruins of more than eleven hundred abandoned villages, towns, and cities for valuable objects. The practice was common because the drowned settlements offered the possibility of recovering heirlooms and other valuables, although authorities prohibited it. For displaced residents, however, the activity could be understood less as ordinary looting than as an attempt to reclaim fragments of Old Dachang from their own submerged homes.

During one such dive, a boy surfaced crying with a bite mark on his foot. The water was too dark and muddy for him to know what had bitten him, and his father vanished during the expedition. The boy later developed the violent symptoms associated with the plague, including fever and the loss of an arm that remained attached to a severed hand. His mother’s account connects the outbreak to the reservoir’s submerged ruins and reveals how displacement, poverty, forbidden salvage, and biological danger intersected in the first outbreak witnessed by the narrator.

The incident also links the reservoir to the wider concealment of the plague. The narrator contacts Gu Wen Kuei, an old army comrade working at the Institute of Infectious Diseases at Chongqing University, after recognizing that the boy’s symptoms may be significant. The reservoir is thus not merely a background location: it is the point where an environmental transformation, a family’s attempt to recover its past, and the first medical recognition of an unprecedented threat converge.

Collapse and the Flood of Destruction

Later, the reservoir’s dam becomes the source of an even larger catastrophe. From orbit, observers using the Aster sensor aboard the Terra Satellite witness the Three Gorges Dam collapse after conventional optics have become useless beneath the gray-brown shroud of nuclear autumn. The disaster releases roughly ten trillion gallons of water, carrying debris, silt, rocks, trees, cars, houses, and pieces of the dam itself as large as houses.

The flood is described as a brown-and-white dragon racing toward the East China Sea. Its victims include people trapped inside barricaded buildings, unable to escape because the living dead wait outside their doors. The number killed is unknown, and bodies continue to be found long afterward. The reservoir’s waters therefore become an instrument of indiscriminate destruction, combining the physical force of a failed megaproject with the already lethal conditions of the undead war.

The collapse is presented as foreseeable rather than inexplicable. The dam had been built on an active fault line; the increased weight of the reservoir had induced earthquakes before; and cracks had reportedly been detected in the foundation months before completion. The official description of the collapse as an unforeseen tragedy is consequently treated as an evasion of responsibility. The reservoir embodies the danger of treating engineered nature as fully controllable, especially when political authority suppresses warnings and substitutes a reassuring explanation for structural failure.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The Three Gorges Reservoir connects local memory to global catastrophe. At its human scale, it is a drowned homeland where families dive for heirlooms and inherit an altered landscape in place of their former town. At its geopolitical scale, it is part of a massive infrastructure project whose failure magnifies the devastation of the Zombie War across central China.

Its narrative placement also changes the meaning of earlier warnings. Signals from Chinese sources had described a viral outbreak that killed victims and reanimated their corpses, but the information was dismissed as possible military coding or a weapon system. The reservoir’s first outbreak provides a concrete, bodily reality behind those obscured reports. Later, the dam collapse shows that the crisis cannot be contained within medicine or battlefield tactics: submerged settlements, communications failures, refugee movements, and monumental infrastructure all become part of the same chain of consequences.

The reservoir’s recurring function is therefore one of transformation. It first buries a civilization’s visible remains, then turns those remains into a site of illicit memory and infection, and finally releases a flood that destroys the living and the dead alike. Its significance lies in that progression from preservation to concealment to collapse: the landscape is repeatedly presented as something human beings attempt to organize, archive, or deny, only for its accumulated pressures to return with overwhelming force.