One day last September, some 1,000 villagers in Xichuan County of Henan Province kowtowed to their village before moving to another town 25 kilometers away.

Danjiangkou Reservoir. [File photo]

They left their homes to make way for the Danjiangkou Reservoir.

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Sitting on the border between central China's Henan and Hubei provinces, the reservoir will be the source of the central route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, a massive engineering scheme to transfer water from the wet South to the dry North.

About 328,000 people in the two provinces will be relocated. For many of them, it will not be their first migration experience.

A villager of Xichuan County surnamed Wan has moved several times in his life. In 1959, he went to Qinghai Province at the call of the government. But he found it difficult to adapt to the local environment, so he went back to Henan two years later.

But life was no easier back at home. Because of the increasing water level in Danjiangkou, people had to move around to escape floods. In the old days, they had to build shacks on high hillocks. Wan says he can still remember how his two kids cried in the chilly winters.

At the end of 2009, in his sixties, Wan moved for the fifth time in his life. This time, he was going to live in a two-story building. Compared with his past experiences, he felt quite satisfied.