Soldiers carrying sandbags instead of guns stood guard yesterday along dikes shielding central Anhui Province from the Yangtze River floodwaters, an official said.

Further downstream in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, one of the area's largest cities, officials said they expect dikes to hold as the river's rain-swollen crest is expected to reach the city late in the night.

Peak water levels in Anhui Province were about a meter above the point considered unsafe for dikes, which were still holding near the city of Dangtu, a provincial official contacted by telephone said. She refused to give her name.

The province has mobilized 44,000 soldiers and civilians to stand watch along earthworks protecting farmland and cities and villages, said the official from the province's Antiflood Command Center.

Nanjing's 5.5 million people were safe behind the city's concrete embankments, said an official from the Jiangsu Provincial Anti-Flood Control Center. He gave only his family name, Song.

Song said no evacuations were planned even as waters were expected to rise above the danger level.

He added that waters would likely rise to one meter below the highest level reached in 1998, when the worst flooding in decades killed 4,150 people in central and northeast China.

Since June, nearly 1,000 people have been reported killed by flooding, collapsed homes and landslides during China's summer rainy season.

Song said no heavy rains were forecast for the region in the coming days, even with a typhoon expected to pass near central China's coast tomorrow.

Water levels along the Yangtze, China's longest river, were slowly dropping upstream in areas hit hard by floods last week.

Near Yueyang, a city in sou-thern Hunan Province, Dong-ting Lake remained 2 meters above the flood level, said an official named Xu from the city's Civil Affairs Bureau.

Xu said it would take at least a month for lake waters to recede enough to allow 200,000 residents evacuated last week to return to their homes.

"All we can do now is wait for the waters to go down," he said.

(eastday.com August 30, 2002)