Shangba is a village of about 3,300 people administered by
Xinjiang Town in
Wengyuan County
Wengyuan ( postal: Yungyun; ) is a county in the north of Guangdong Province, China, bordering Jiangxi to the northeast. It is under the administration of Shaoguan City. It has a population of 421,756 in 2019, 99.55% of whom speak Hakka. Yao langu ...
,
Guangdong.
It is an agricultural village, with rice and sugar cane being major crops. In 2007 the village acquired the nickname China's "
Village of Death" due to the extremely high incidence of cancer in its population.
In addition, the local river, the
Hengshui River, known locally as "The Dead River", is Shangba's only water supply, and it has become so polluted that it is endangering the of those living nearby. One of the major pollutants in the river and well water is
lead, which a provincial research institute reported as being present in the well water at some fifteen times what the national government set as a maximum acceptable rate for drinking water.
The presumed source of the pollution is the
Dabaoshan Mine for
zinc, once Asia's largest mine for this mineral. The village's crops are also highly contaminated.
In 2020 it was reported that over 1 billion Yuan was spent on
soil remediation and improved mining processes, reducing the level of pollutants considerably.
References
Cancer clusters
Villages in China
Wengyuan County
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