WE don't know how long the men were waiting for us at the produce shop. Word must have got around that there was a group of foreign correspondents in Heyuan, staying in the Jine Ye Hotel across the road.
When we bought bottled water in the store early in the morning a thin shabbily dressed man approached, produced a document, then without another word hurried off down the street with three companions.
What he gave us was a copy of a petition 300 villagers had submitted to the Guangdong government on March 20th seeking justice for grievances against local development officials. It was a daring act to approach foreigners, but these were desperate people who said they had nothing left to lose as they were unable to make a living or get enough food for children.
Their action opened a window on a little reported aspect of life in China - the continuing suffering of millions of peasants displaced after Mao Zedong ordered the hasty construction of thousands of reservoirs all over China in 1958.
Heyaun lies in the impoverished mountains of Guangdong Province in southern China.
I had been invited for a rare visit to see what the authorities were doing 40 years later to cope with the legacy of poverty from Mao's disastrous "Great Leap Forward".
Near Heyuan, 100,000 peasants were made homeless when the river Xinfeng was dammed to form the Wanlu reservoir. It took us an hour in a rusty ship with cane chairs on deck to cross the 16,000 sq km artificial lake which today provides fresh water to Hong Kong, 180 km to the south.
The five page petition recounted how 60 peasant families had been resettled in "Sunshine Village" when Wanlue lake was created. But they were moved again in 1988 when the authorities expanded Heyuan toe create a city of three million people. They were given no land or compensation. In 1992, the city government ordered that they be compensated, but nothing happened.
"They cut our lifeline," the petition said. "Every family has been forced to borrow money to live. Even to get food is a serious problem. Someone must come and help the old and the children. They must have books and the big question of eating must be kept in the heart of the government departments."
Thousands of displaced rural people continue to eke out a living in the forested hills around the reservoir. Now they, too, are being moved, not just to combat poverty but to guarantee water quality.
The district resettlement director, Mr Chen Heling, told us 20,000 people still lived in the hills, 10,000 people had been resettled in villages and 20,000 had gone to the cities. Each resettled family, he said, had been given almost half an acre to grow crops.
One of the newest resettlement villages is "Happiness Garden", built a few kilometres from the reservoir among terraced paddy fields and lush vegetable patches. Here 365 families comprising 2,000 people live in small brick houses.
Some of them agreed that it was more convenient" to live there - it is near a main road - but a 28 year old man who had been dozing in a back room said as he lit a cigarette that 80 per cent of the people could not find work and the others just got odd jobs. They had been given only tiny plots of land.
A 75 year old man, out walking in khaki cap and Mao jacket, complained: "Things are difficult here. We have no land, nothing." He remembered how 70 people in his village of 3,000 died in the famine caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward before it went under water. They had been given only a couple of hours to leave their houses when the dam was built and some had run away into the mountains.
A 70 year old woman wearing a black velvet beret said at the door of her home that it was hard to get enough to eat every day. During the 1950s famine, "we ate leaves and wild vegetables", she said. "My husband died of illness and one daughter died when she was a year old because she did not have enough to eat and no money to see a doctor."
"These people were sacrificed by the state so others could have clear water," acknowledged the resettlement officer. Now a new drive is under way to give all the displaced peasants housing and education, and government officials have been assigned to help individual families on a one to one basis.
"We experienced great difficulties after the construction of the dam," said Heyuan's communist party secretary, Yang Huawei. "In the past few years, 220,000 have been lifted out of poverty, though 73,000 are still below the poverty line."
The government has also promoted schemes which have made some farmers very rich. Li Maoxiang lives nearby and employs 40 workers. Standing under a grapefruit tree with dragonflies flitting overheard, the 50 year old former soldier told us how he had prospered.
Ten years ago, his extended family of 33 members had 10,000 yuan (£1,250) to live on for a year, he said. Judging him to be an exceptional entrepreneur, the government had allocated him a big tract of used land.
Now he has hundreds of fruit trees, a pig farm and fish ponds, and he makes 100 times that amount a year. "I am a millionaire now," he said, waving his mobile phone in the direction of the once barren hillside.