Cuntan Station on the Yangtze River in Chongqing saw its highest water level since 1939 on Thursday morning, according to the Chongqing Emergency Response Bureau.

Water rose above the level of the catastrophic flood of July 1981.

At 7 am, the water at Cuntan was measured at 191.51 meters (Wusong elevation), 0.1 meter higher than the flood of 1981, which left 1.5 million people homeless.

More than 8,660 square kilometers of arable land were flooded. The direct economic loss caused by the floods was about 2 billion yuan ($289 million).

Because of heavy downpours in the Sichuan Basin in the upper Yangtze region, the city flooded again on Monday, the fifth time this year, the Ministry of Water Resources said.

Chongqing municipality is located in the upper Yangtze watershed. The river flows 6,300 kilometers from glaciers in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau through the city, and then to Wuhan, Hubei province, and Nanjing, Jiangsu province, before reaching the East China Sea at Shanghai.