I am in the White Crane Ridge Underwater Museum near the city of Fuling. The museum is the strangest sight here – it’s under 40 metres of water on the side of the Three Gorges Dam*. I’ve known the museum director, Huang Dejian, since before the museum existed. The last time I saw him, the Three Gorges Dam was still under construction 450 kilometres down the river. Fuling is at the junction of the Yangtze and the Wu Rivers. In the mid-1990s it felt sleepy and isolated. There was no main road or railway line. The Yangtze ferries took seven hours to reach Chongqing, the nearest large city. Foreigners were rare – if I ate my lunch in the town centre, a crowd often came to watch me. The city had one escalator, one nightclub, and no traffic lights. I didn’t know anybody with a car.