6th December – Yichang, China

It was surprisingly sunny as we looked out over the construction site that is currently the centre of Yichang. We watched a worker climb up a tower crane, thinking he was the replacement driver, only for him to head to the top of the counterweight and do some tai chi!

It’s the earliest we’ve gotten going for a while, so we joined the locals in looking for breakfast. I took a warm millet porridge and we found a bun seller steaming some fresh vegetable baos to take with us for lunch. Such is my exhaustion-addled brain that I tried to speak (very limited) Italian to him before realising where we were.

The bus to the edge of Yichang was busy but made good progress. We bought two return tickets to the scenic area and were helpfully told to follow a retired Chinese couple who were getting off at the same stop. The 30-minute journey took us west along the Yangtze past mountains, over precipitous bridges, and through long dark tunnels. It’s lovely to be back in this region of the Three Gorges, this time Xiling Gorge. Xiling is the most downstream of the three but actually consists of many smaller gorges. Historically, this was the most dangerous section of the Yangtze to navigate but this all changed a quarter of a century ago along with millions of lives in this region.

The Three Gorges Dam was finished in 2003 after a decade of construction. It’s neither the tallest nor widest dam in the world, but at 181m by 2.3km with a reservoir stretching some 600km upstream it’ is utterly vast. We had our passports and visas scrutinised and were allowed into the controlled area around the structure. To visit here has been a dream of mine for 20 years since reading Deidre Chatham’s ‘The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges’. To me, the dam, remaining gorges, and the upstream area around Chongqing, which we’ve already visited, symbolise the Yangtze and epitomise China’s era of rapid industrialisation, for good and bad, and the confluence of humanity and nature.

The area is clearly sat up for mass tourism in huge numbers, but today we were two of a few dozen visitors and the only foreigners. We caught a shuttle bus to the first viewing platform. This looks northeast out over the two series of 5 huge locks, each of which take four 100m+ barges at once, 156 metres up or down. It was mesmerising to watch the slowly rising and falling water, which nowadays enables safe navigation of this stretch. We walked around and down towards the dam itself, having only seen a sneak peek from the lock viewing area. It’s difficult to grasp the scale of the construction as everything – the water, the concrete, the ships are at a scale beyond the usual human perception. Nearest us was the giant ship lift which also allows vessels, such as the giant waiting car transporter, to pass in a quarter of the time of passage through the locks.

Another shuttle bus took us downstream and over the suspension bridge to the south side of the river to see the dam from below. This is where we felt small and also slightly concerned to be directly below such stored energy. The turbines of the world’s largest power station could be heard whirring. Flow is low at this time of year but at full capacity the dam generates two and a half times the electricity of even the largest multi-reactor nuclear power station (the 8 highest capacity power stations globally are all hydro). Indeed, if situated in the UK, this one site would cover 40% of the country’s energy needs during flood season. As it is, it generates around 1.4% of China’s electricity and reduces the risk of the dangerous historic floods we saw evidence of in Yichang, Wuhan, and Nanjing.

Of course, the dam isn’t without controversy, such as habitat destruction, potential uncertain seismic impacts, and of course the 1.3 million people who were displaced that I wrote about previously. Landslides have likely become much more prevalent in the area, although decisive evidence seems limited. It is even thought that the length of a day on Earth was increased by 0.06 microseconds! The high-turbidity, low-sediment water flowing downstream had that typical look only present in waters downstream of a dam. It remains to be seen what the long-term impacts are of such large-scale engineering and how history will judge such schemes. Regardless, it seems that the era of constructing mega dams is a thing of the past in China.