On 28 September 1999 the Yunyang county seat left Yunyang Town for Shuangjiang on the north bank. It was the furthest full relocation of a county seat in the reservoir, and more than 170,000 people moved with it. The new town stands 162 miles from the dam and 223 miles from Chongqing. The county now has more than 150,000 local residences and 920,000 residents, over 420,000 of them in the town. The old seat and the ground it stood on are under the reservoir. The name survives: Yunyang is still one of the county's towns.
From the journal
The county seat that moved furthest, and the first 150 households
Yunyang moved its seat in 1999, further than any other reservoir county. A year later, 150 of its households left for Shanghai.
In the same city · Yunyang ↗The seat that left in 1999
The first to leave
On 17 July 2000, 150 households from Yunyang moved together to Chongming County in Shanghai. They were the first group of reservoir migrants to leave for another province. The scale behind that first group is in the national record: 129 towns were drowned, among them the large city of Wanzhou and the medium city of Fuling, and more than 1.2 million people were resettled across 20 counties and districts in Hubei and Chongqing. When the municipality was enlarged in March 1997 to take in the Wanxian and Fuling municipalities, it took on 85 per cent of the project's resettled people.
What the county kept
The county built a museum for the culture of the Three Gorges migrants. It also kept its older record: Qin set up Juren County here in 314 BC, the seat moved to Tangkou in 568 and the county was renamed Yun'an, it became a prefecture in 1283 and a county again in 1373. Panshi City still stands on the height behind the town. And the county's fresh noodle industry now supplies more than 70 per cent of the Chinese market, a trade that runs on the roads out rather than on the river.