Huang Dafa is a villager from Caowangba in Guizhou Province, southwest China, who spent decades trying to bring water to his drought-stricken village. Starting with a first attempt that failed, he went away to learn water engineering in his fifties, returned, and led about 200 neighbours in cutting a canal along sheer karst cliffs. Water reached the village in 1995. Counted from his first efforts as a young village leader in 1959, the story spans about 36 years.
The canal, roughly 9.4 kilometres long including its branches, is now known locally as the Dafa Canal. Here is how it was built, why it took so long, and what it changed.
A village with land but no water
Caowangba sits high in the karst mountains of Zunyi, in northern Guizhou. Karst is limestone country: rain sinks quickly through cracks into underground channels, so even areas with decent rainfall can be short of surface water. Water existed in the region, but it lay beyond cliffs and ridges, and the village had no way to bring it home.
For generations, families carried water by hand. Fields could support only maize and other dry crops, and rice, which needs flooded paddies, was out of reach. Huang became a local leader in 1959, at about 23, and made water his first goal.
Huang Dafa, born in 1936, photographed in his later years; he was once mocked for the canal idea and is now honoured for it. Image via Oddity Central / Inhabitat
The first attempt and why it failed
With hand tools and a lot of muscle, villagers worked on a channel for more than a decade. It never delivered water. According to China Daily, the problem was knowledge: nobody involved understood surveying or water-conservancy engineering, so the route and gradient were not right. A canal that relies on gravity has to fall gently and steadily over its whole length, and small errors across kilometres of rough terrain add up.
Some neighbours called the project foolish, and the scorn was real. The effort did leave something useful behind, including paths across difficult ground that made travel easier.
Going back to school at 53
Instead of giving up, Huang took a job at a local water management station and spent about three years teaching himself hydraulic engineering: how to survey a slope, how to set a gradient, how to line a channel so water would not leak away into the porous rock.
He came back with a plan. In 1992, work began on a new route that started higher up and followed the cliff faces. Villagers, mostly farmers with simple tools, lowered themselves on ropes tied around their waists to chip a shelf for the channel into the rock. Workers reportedly slept in caves on the mountain during long stretches of work.
Part of the canal cut along the cliff face; the main channel runs about 7.2 kilometres, with another 2.2 kilometres of branches. Image via Oddity Central / Inhabitat
Workers had to dangle from ropes on the steepest sections to carve the channel by hand. Image via Oddity Central / Inhabitat
The cost to Huang and his family
Reports from Chinese media say the work came at a heavy personal cost. Huang is reported to have been away on the mountain when his daughter and grandson died, and to have missed their funerals. These details come from interviews with him and could not be independently confirmed, but they are part of why the story is told with such respect in China.
What the canal changed
In 1995 water finally flowed into Caowangba. The canal allowed dry fields to be turned into paddies; China Daily reports the rice area reached about 48 hectares. Earlier English-language coverage said the canal served around 1,200 people in Caowangba and three neighbouring villages and that annual rice output passed 400,000 kilograms; those figures are widely repeated but not confirmed in official sources.
Water was only the first step. Huang later described his promise like this: “I decided to do three things for the villagers: bring water to the village, build a road and provide access to electricity.” Electricity and a road arrived in the mid-1990s, and he also helped build two schools.
Huang is often compared with Yugong, the “Foolish Old Man” of Chinese legend who refused to stop digging away at two mountains. Image via Oddity Central / Inhabitat
Why people call him a living Yugong
The comparison comes from an ancient fable, The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains, first recorded in the Daoist book Liezi. In it, a 90-year-old man sets out to dig away two great mountains that block his path. When mocked, he answers that his children and grandchildren will continue the work, and the gods, moved by his persistence, carry the mountains away.
Huang’s story fits the fable almost too well, and it has been used in the same way: as an example of collective persistence. In 2021 he received the July 1 Medal, one of the highest honours of the Communist Party of China, and he has also been named a National Model Worker. In retirement he has spoken to younger audiences about the hardship of building the canal.
Lessons beyond one village
Persistence is the obvious lesson, but it is not the only one. Huang’s first decade failed because enthusiasm was not matched by technical knowledge; the second effort worked because he went and got that knowledge. Community work mattered too: a canal like this cannot be built, or maintained, by one person. Rockfalls, silt and leaks mean that clearing and repairing the channel is a job that never fully ends.
Similar stories exist elsewhere, from India’s Dashrath Manjhi, who carved a road through a hill with hand tools, to community water projects worldwide. What they share is a clear local need, stubborn people, and, eventually, the skills to match the ambition.
Sources: China Daily HK (2021); Xinhua (2017); Wikipedia: The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains; Oddity Central (images); Inhabitat (images).
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