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Three Gorges Dam and Qu Yuan’s Home (三峡大坝·屈原故里)

A long low concrete dam stretching the full width of a river under a tall cloudy sky, a spillway section of closely spaced concrete piers at its centre, red gantry cranes spaced along the crest, flat green-grey water in front of it and a bank of loose grey rock in the foreground

Hubei · The Other Answer to the Same River

Three Gorges Dam and Qu Yuan’s Home (三峡大坝·屈原故里)

A concrete dam about two kilometres wide across the Yangtze at Yichang, with a reservoir behind it that reaches back through the gorges for hundreds of kilometres. The thing to look at is not the wall. It is the staircase of locks beside it.

Quick Facts

The Short Version

What it is A hydroelectric dam and navigation complex on the Yangtze, plus a relocated memorial to the poet Qu Yuan on the reservoir shore
Where Sandouping, about 40 km upstream of Yichang in Hubei
Built Construction began in 1994, the wall was completed in 2006 and the last generators came online in 2012
Size The dam stands about 180 m above its foundation and runs roughly 2.3 km from bank to bank
Power Ranked as the largest power station in the world by installed capacity, at about 22,500 megawatts
Navigation A five-step lock flight in two lanes, and a separate ship lift for smaller vessels that raises them in one movement
The cost Around 1.3 million people were resettled and thirteen cities, towns and hundreds of villages went under the water
Time needed Half a day for the dam. A full day if the memorial is included

Why Go

Two Answers to One River

1. Look at the locks, not the wall

From the viewing platforms the dam is a horizontal concrete line with cranes on it, and most visitors take a photograph of it and are quietly disappointed. The interesting structure is off to one side. Ships crossing the dam go through a flight of five locks in sequence, each one a chamber the size of a city block, and the flight lifts a vessel something over a hundred metres from the level of the old river to the level of the reservoir.

Watching a convoy work through it takes hours and is the only part of the site that makes the scale of the thing legible. A separate ship lift handles smaller vessels in a single movement, carrying them up in a water-filled caisson rather than stepping them through chambers. If the visit is timed to catch either of these working, it is worth the trip; if it is not, the dam is a wall.

2. The other answer, twenty-two centuries earlier

China has been arguing with this problem for a long time, and it has given two opposite answers. At Dujiangyan in the third century BC the answer was to build nothing across the river at all: split the flow with a spit, let the excess and the gravel spill back out over a low weir, meter what reaches the plain through a cut in a hill, and dredge the beds every winter. That system has worked for twenty-two hundred years and irrigates more ground now than it ever has.

Here the answer was the opposite one. Block the river, hold the water, and take the electricity and the flood control and the deep-water navigation that follow. Both answers are defensible and neither is free. The old one costs an annual dredging programme and a permanent bureaucracy to run it. This one cost the valley behind the wall. Seeing the two within the same trip is the most useful thing a visitor can do with either.

Looking down from a terrace over the lock complex: concrete chambers and gates filling the lower left, a wide approach channel beyond them with several white passenger vessels and an orange cargo ship waiting in it, a long suspension bridge crossing the river in the middle distance, transmission pylons on the right and hazy ranges behind
The lock complex and the queue for it. The chambers are bottom left; the ships in the channel are waiting their turn. A vessel goes up or down the whole flight one chamber at a time, which is why the wait is measured in hours.
The upstream face of the dam seen along its length: a plain vertically ribbed concrete wall running away to the right with red gantry cranes standing at intervals on its crest, a blue floating boom moored against it at the near end, and the flat grey-green reservoir filling the whole right of the frame up to hazy layered mountains
The reservoir side, with the water standing close under the crest. The blue line on the surface is a floating boom that catches drifting debris before it reaches the intakes.
From above a landscaped hilltop terrace: white balustrades, clipped lawns and paths, a tour group in red caps gathered on a paved circle, a blue photo kiosk at the right, and beyond them a switchyard filled with rows of transmission pylons, the dam with its red gantries at the right, and hazy ranges behind
This is the visit: a managed terrace at a fixed distance, with a photo kiosk on it. The forest of pylons in the middle ground is worth as much attention as the wall, since that is where the output actually leaves.
Four tall concrete cylinders standing in flat grey water with a black floating boom strung between them, a headland across the water carrying white apartment blocks, a broad pale band of bare ground along the waterline below the town, and hazy ranges behind
The reservoir. The pale band along the far shore is the drawdown zone: the level here is worked up and down by tens of metres through the year, and that strip is under water for part of it. The town above it was rebuilt at the new level.
The dam seen along its length from a scrubby hillside, tall grass and red-leaved bushes in the foreground, a switchyard full of pylons on the flat ground to the left, and tower cranes and scaffolding standing over the right-hand end of the dam
From the hillside, where the two kilometres of it register. The tower cranes at the right date this picture: it was taken while the site was still being built, and the works on that end are since finished.

The catch. The dam is a working installation and the visit is a managed one: shuttle buses, fixed viewing platforms, security checks and no access to anything operational. From the platforms it does not look like much, and a great deal depends on whether there is traffic in the locks while you are there. The memorial to Qu Yuan is a reconstruction on a new site and is often skipped, which is understandable and still a pity.

Orientation

From Yichang, and Not by Accident

Yichang is the base and the dam is about forty kilometres upstream. Buses run from the city to the visitor centre at Sandouping, where everyone transfers to site shuttles; independent vehicles do not go in. Passports are needed at the entry check. Half a day covers the viewing platforms without rushing.

Qu Yuan’s memorial sits on the reservoir shore near the dam, moved there when the water rose over the original site at Zigui. It is a separate ticket and a separate hour, and it is the part of this listing that most itineraries drop.

Practical

Things Worth Knowing

Ask about lock traffic before you go

A convoy locking through turns the visit from a photograph into an event. Without one there is much less to watch.

Bring your passport

There is a security check at the entrance and identification is required. This catches people out.

Pair it with the gorges, not with a city day

The dam makes far more sense after a boat through the gorges upstream than as an item wedged into a Yichang afternoon.

Give the memorial its hour

A relocated shrine to a poet who drowned himself in a river, moved uphill because of the reservoir, is a stranger and better half hour than the platforms.

Timing

When to Go

Season The case for The catch
October to November The clearest air of the year and comfortable temperatures on the open platforms The first week of October is a national holiday
March to May Mild, green on the slopes, and the reservoir is usually at its lower level Spring haze is common on this stretch of the river
June to September Flood season, when the dam is doing the job it was built for and spilling is possible Hot, humid and hazy, with little shade on the platforms
December to February The reservoir is held high for the dry season and the water is at its fullest Grey, damp and often fogged in

Context

What Is Under the Water

Before the reservoir, this stretch of the Yangtze was a working river that killed people regularly. Isabella Bird came up it by houseboat in 1896 and published what she saw three years later. Every bad rapid had red lifeboats moored above and below it. The current ran at seven to eleven miles an hour. Wrecks were visible along the banks: masts above water, derelicts on the sandbanks, hulls broken on the rocks that had caught them.

The labour was the part that is hardest to imagine now. Boats were hauled upstream on split bamboo ropes by gangs of trackers walking a path cut as a groove into the rock face. At the worst rapid, Xintan, Bird’s own small boat needed seventy men on the rope and the big junks took three hundred on top of their own crews. Whole villages of mat huts went up along the shore for the navigation season and came down again when the water rose, with sellers of food, tobacco and bamboo rope following the work.

At the mouth of Qutang Gorge she recorded a black polished block of rock that split the channel in two, standing forty feet clear of the water in February and nearly submerged by June. When it went under entirely the authorities upstream stopped all descending traffic until it showed again. That rock was blasted away for navigation in the 1950s. Xintan and the tracker villages are under the reservoir. The gorges are still there and still worth the boat, but the river Bird describes is gone, and this dam is the reason for most of it.

Nearby

Other Stops on the Same Trip

Spot · 190 km upstream

Lesser Three Gorges (小三峡)

Three short gorges on a tributary at Wushan, run in small boats, and the easiest way to see gorge country at close range.

A full day.

Spot · 100 km north

Shennong Stream (神农溪)

A tributary run in narrow wooden boats that were hauled upstream on ropes within living memory.

A day.

Where to Base

Yichang (宜昌)

Yichang is where the gorges end and the plain begins, and it has been the transfer point on this river for as long as there has been traffic on it. It is the base for the dam, the downstream end of every gorge cruise, and a high-speed rail stop on the line between Wuhan and Chongqing.

The sensible shape of a trip here is water first and concrete second: come down through the gorges by boat, then visit the dam, so that the thing under the reservoir is fresh when you are looking at the reservoir.

Experiences

What You Can Actually Do Here

On site · half day

The dam and the locks

The viewing platforms and, with luck and timing, a convoy working through the lock flight.

Shuttle and entry ticket; passport required.

On site · 1 hr

Qu Yuan’s memorial

The relocated shrine on the reservoir shore, and the story of why it is where it is.

Separate ticket.

Guided · 5 days

The river, upstream and down

The gorges by boat, the dam at the bottom, and Dujiangyan at the far end of the same argument about what to do with a river.

We arrange this. See experiences.

Give it half a day, ask whether anything is locking through, and stand at the platform with one fact in mind: the flat water upstream is about a hundred metres deeper than the river that used to run there, and under it are the rapids, the tracker paths cut into the rock and the towns that were moved. The wall is the smaller half of what there is to see here.

The River Before and After

Tell us your dates and our local team will run the gorges by boat and finish at the dam, so the two halves land in the right order. We can extend it west to Dujiangyan if you want both of China’s answers to the same river.

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