The 2004 Indonesian Tsunami and last summer's Hurricane Katrina pale in comparison to the devastation and death caused by the 1931 flood in China.

Nobody knows exactly how many Chinese died. Some say 1 million, most records say 3.7 million. In Gaoyou of East China's Jiangsu Province, there were 88,000 deaths alone.

What is certain is the carnage and misery it caused was unprecedented and today, unimaginable. An area of 110,000 square kilometres was inundated after the Huaihe, Yangtze and Yellow rivers all exceeded their historical record flood stages simultaneously and destroyed the livelihood of 50 million people.

Though the 1931 China Flood is acknowledged as the worst water-related disaster of the 20th century, it is a story that history had forgotten, until now.

The Great Depression, Japan's invasion of China and the civil war Chiang Kai-Shek waged against the Communists overshadowed the calamity.

But the story lived strong in the memories and story telling of two Americans, my father, Hutch, and his brother Jim Harnsberger. They dreamed to return it home all their lives.

In late August, three generations of Harnsbergers, a Christian missionary family with roots in China stretching back to 1892, returned to Gaoyou, Jiangsu Province, for the ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the great flood and levee breaks.

In partnership with local officials, we dedicated a new stone memorial on the Gaoyou levees, site of the great ruptures. We took our family myth and literally turned it into stone.

The 2006 Memorial was erected in honour of five forgotten heroes who provided extraordinary flood relief service to millions. saving the lives of hundreds of thousands.

The five heroes include famed American aviators Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Presbyterian missionary Lyt Harnsberger, who instigated the reconstruction of the dikes, Chinese General Wang Shuxiang, the lead project engineer and Buddhist Hermit Lin, who funded the reconstruction project from a single donation provided by a sale of all his personal property.

"How can I save myself if I do not save others?" read Hermit Lin's anonymous donation letter.

My father always told us the great flood story, but it always seemed too outrageous to be true. He told us that as he and Jim, then 8 and 10 year olds, climbed Taizhou's city wall, and saw muddy water stretched as far as you could see in every direction.

It happened early on August 26, 1931, following a fierce typhoon; Gaoyou was destroyed by a raging torrent as the city slept. Gaoyou (200 kilometres northwest of Shanghai) is a small city, famous for Marco Polo's visit and for its history as the last remaining outpost of the Chinese postal system.

In 1931, Gaoyou endured the single worse levee breaks of the 20th century's worst flood. Eight weeks of record rain had already swollen the Yangtze and Huai Rivers and Gaoyou Lake to their historic highs.

Then, the typhoon walloped the region, blowing away the poorly maintained dikes. Like New Orleans, it was the levee breaks, not the typhoon that did the damage.

The city of Gaoyou sits more than 5 metres below the level of Gaoyou Lake, separated only by the Grand Canal and its dikes. Multiple levee breaks drained the entire lake, pouring down upon the entire countryside 160 kilometres east, all the way to the Yellow Sea, creating a 25,900 square kilometre "inland sea."

The story comes home

"I remember living at the Gaoyou dikes vividly," Jim Harnsberger, 84, said. "We sailed over the 10,000 square mile (25,900 square kilometre) inland sea on our family houseboat and saw many of the dead floating on the way."

He recalled that General Wang and my grandfather Lyt became the best friends and together they lead this enormous dike reconstruction project.

They worked under great threat of disease and of violence from local warlords, working without pay for over a year, but they still tried to produce the finest dike reconstruction in all of China.

Lyt regarded this dike work as the greatest piece of charity work he had ever accomplished.

They also fed the starving with 2,000 tons of American wheat. They completed the Grand Canal levee project under budget, on time and refunded money to the China Foreign Famine Relief Commission, something that had never happened before.

Retelling the story

Bringing home the story to China was the family's dream.

Although Hutch was not able to see it come true, it was his spirit passing the task to me that made it possible.

In 2002, I had asked family friend Shu Xiaojuan to search the Nanjing Archives. Shu made the critical discovery that turned the myth into history and made this memorial possible. She found the entire levee reconstruction project history, perfectly preserved in the Nanjing Archives.

Her discovery helped our dream come true.

With the stone monument unveiled on August 26 this year, this lost history will forever be remembered.

The August 26 ceremony also included donations from the Harnsberger family and Lindbergh family for the memorial.

Reeve Lindbergh donated an original copy of her mother Anne Lindbergh's 1935 best selling book, "North to the Orient," signed by Charles and Anne.

Five plum trees were donated by Margaret Eiluned Morgan, the Lindbergh's niece and were planted in memory of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's pioneering aerial disaster relief in Northern Jiangsu.

The Lindberghs flew into China in September at the end of their historic "North to the Orient" flight in 1931. It was a month after the floods and they immediately volunteered to help, conducting aerial surveys for the government.

I had found the striking Lindbergh aerial photographs on Google last year at his home of Damaris Peck Reynolds just six weeks after Hutch's death and recognized they were images of the Gaoyou levee breaks.

They are now highlights of the 1931 Gaoyou Flood museum, which opened on December 30, 2005.

In our family, the great flood story had always been a larger-than-life legend about a near-Biblical flood. No one thought such a story could actually be true. In reality, this myth was dwarfed by the history we unearthed of the lost story of 20th century's greatest flood.

"Imagine Lake Erie set down on top of Massachusetts, a mammoth lake stretching as far as the eye could see, smiling peacefully over drowned homes," Anne Lindbergh said.

Gaoyou Vice-Mayor Ni Wencai writes: "The story of this terrible disaster and these remarkable heroes had been completely forgotten. Not until the Harnsbergers returned in 2001, had we ever heard of it. There were no records of Americans ever having been in Gaoyou."

"When Steve Harnsberger showed up with these incredible flood photographs, we knew he had rediscovered a real treasure, we jointly created the 1931 Flood Museum and the new monument celebrating the longtime friendship between the Chinese and the American people.

"To me, that Chinese-American friendship is what it is all about," Ni wrote.

What had started out simply as my father's fable turned into the something magnificent, a story remembering great heroes in a disaster unparalled and lost in time, one inspired by the grief of a son wishing to honour his father.

When that stone memorial was finally unveiled, it was a moment of pure jubilation and triumph, of life overcoming death and men surviving even the greatest disaster. We were all moved by the history we had found. It became the stuff that legends are made of.

It was Hutch's dream to see the story restored to China but he didn't make it in the end. He provided the inspiration to complete the journey.

Now, a new memorial stone is planted in the "good earth" of those dikes mixed with my father's ashes, never to be forgotten.

In the end, the story became not one about death or horrible disaster, but rather one of a remarkable recovery of life, renewing and reseeding itself against all odds.

Ping An (Peace) to all! That is what Hutch would have said.

(China Daily 10/03/2006 page9)