In the summer evenings, an avenue of dawn redwoods stretches into the golden light along the Fan Gong Dyke in Rudong county, Nantong, Jiangsu province, colored half-green and half-russet.

Above, egrets skim the treetops. Below, cars thread through the forest. In the blink of a thousand years, the Fan Gong Dyke has watched over it all — the coming and going of tides, the shifting of sea and land.