10-Day Hubei: Wuhan, Wudangshan, the Dam and the Yangtze

Morning or midday - arrival
Wuhan is three cities that became one: Wuchang on the south bank, the scholarly one; Hanyang, the industrial one; and Hankou on the north bank, the port the British, Russians, French, Germans and Japanese all carved concessions out of after 1861. Your guide meets you at Tianhe airport or at Wuhan, Wuchang or Hankou railway station - all three are on the metro, and all three are within an hour of the river - and drives you to the Wuchang side, where almost everything in this programme begins.

The Yellow Crane Tower
The tower stands on Snake Hill, and the view from the top is the reason to climb it: the Yangtze, a kilometre and a half of brown water wide here, and the first Yangtze bridge, built with Soviet help between 1955 and 1957, running straight out from the foot of the hill. The building itself is a 1985 reconstruction in reinforced concrete, moved about a kilometre from the original site when the bridge took the old one, and it follows the Qing form rather than any earlier one. What survives from the older towers is the poetry. Cui Hao's seventh-century lines about the yellow crane that left and never came back are the reason the place has its name, and Li Bai came here and famously declined to write, saying Cui Hao had already done it better. Your guide reads them in translation on the terrace and then leaves you to look at the river, which is the real exhibit.

Lunch
Wuhan eats breakfast more seriously than most cities eat dinner, and hot dry noodles - re gan mian - are the reason. Sesame paste, pickled radish, scallion, a little chilli oil, and noodles that have been parboiled, oiled and cooled so they stay springy. Your first meal is a small one: hot dry noodles, a bowl of sweet rice wine with egg, and a plate of sanxian doupi, the fried rectangle of rice, egg, mushroom and pork that is the other Wuhan breakfast. A mild version is ordered alongside for anyone who wants it.

Afternoon - Hubu Alley and the riverbank
Hubu Alley runs down the hill from the tower and has been a food street since the Ming, when it served the provincial administration offices that stood here. It is touristy and worth twenty minutes: the alley is narrow, the stalls are loud, and the food is real enough that locals still come for the grilled squid and the fried lotus root. From the bottom of the alley you are on the riverbank, and the walk north along it gives you the bridge from underneath and the ferries crossing to Hankou.

Evening
Dinner near the hotel. If the group has the energy and the season is right, the night market on Jiqing Street is the place for crayfish in oil and chilli, which Wuhan eats in quantities that are hard to credit between May and September.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, Wuhan.

Morning - the train west
The high-speed line runs north-west out of Wuhan across the Jianghan plain and into the hills, and Shiyan East is about two hours out. Your guide travels with you, handles the tickets, and has the scenic-area admission pre-booked: Wudangshan runs timed entry and the mountain shuttle is compulsory, because private vehicles are not allowed past the gate.

Afternoon - Zixiao Palace
The Yongle emperor, who reigned from 1402 to 1424, had Wudangshan built as a single project: hundreds of thousands of labourers, nine palaces, nine monasteries, and 33 building groups in all, laid out along a sacred geography that runs from the foot of the mountain to the Golden Summit on the highest peak. The UNESCO inscription covers the ancient building complex, and what makes it exceptional is not any single hall but the way the whole thing is fitted to the terrain - terraces cut into slopes, axes aligned on peaks, and not one courtyard on a flat site.

Zixiao Palace, the Purple Clouds, is the largest surviving complex and the one you see first. Its main hall sits on a three-tier terrace of stone, dated to 1413, with a double-eave roof and the bracket work of the early Ming left unpainted except for the coloured draught that has been restored. Inside is a Ming bronze statue of Zhenwu, the Dark Warrior, the deity the mountain is dedicated to. Around the courtyards are the subsidiary halls, the stele pavilions with Yongle's own inscriptions, and the Taoist clergy, who still maintain the place as a working temple.

The Wudang Museum
At the foot of the mountain, the museum holds what the archaeologists and the conservators have taken off the buildings: roof tiles with reign marks, bronze, and the documentation of the 2003 fire that destroyed the main hall of Yuzhen Palace and the restoration that followed. Forty-five minutes, and worth it before you go up rather than after.

Evening
Dinner at the foot of the mountain. Your guide briefs the group on the morning: if you want the Golden Summit at first light, the shuttle starts before dawn and the cable car opens around seven.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
At the foot of Wudangshan, or on the mountain if booked in advance.

Early start
The mountain opens early and the shuttle runs from the gate through a series of valleys to the separate sites. Going up first is the usual order, because the summit cloud usually burns off by mid-morning and returns after two. Your guide takes the Qiongtai cable car with you - about 1,500 metres of line, twenty minutes - and walks the last stretch to the top.

The Golden Summit
At 1,612 metres, the peak carries a walled enclosure and, inside it, a hall cast in bronze and gilded, assembled in Beijing in 1416 and carried up the mountain in pieces. It is small - about five metres across - and it has stood there through six centuries of lightning, which is why the ridge is fitted with conductors and why the guides have a story about the fire that used to be lit every sixty years. The hall holds a bronze Zhenwu and the original lamps. The enclosure is reached by a narrow stair through a gate in the wall, and the queue in high season is the one thing to budget for: an hour is normal in July and October.

Nanyan Palace
Nanyan, the South Cliff, is the other reason to come. The palace is set into a recess in the cliff on the south face, with halls built out over the drop on timber supports and stone brackets, and a terrace that projects into the air above the valley. The most photographed object on the mountain is here: the Dragon Head Incense Burner, a two-metre stone dragon carved in the Yuan and cantilevered off the edge of the cliff, on which pilgrims used to walk out to set incense, and which is now fenced. The carving, the brackets under the halls and the way the whole complex is keyed into the rock are the finest surviving examples of Ming construction on a cliff anywhere in China.

Lunch
On the mountain. The food is simple - noodles, rice, mountain vegetables, and the local mushrooms - and the guide orders a plain table. Vegetarian food is easy here, since the temples run their own kitchens, and Wudang's Taoist vegetarian cooking is worth asking for.

Afternoon
Down by shuttle to Taizipo, the Prince's Slope, where the Nine-Bend Wall and the hall complex of 1412 sit on a slope with the brackets doing most of the visual work. If the group has the legs, the old stone path from Nanyan down to the valley floor is a real pilgrim route with shrines along it.

Evening
Dinner at the foot of the mountain.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
At the foot of Wudangshan.

Morning - the taiji session
Wudang is the home of the internal martial arts as they are practised now, and the attribution goes back to Zhang Sanfeng, a figure of the Song or the Yuan who is credited with founding the Wudang school. The history is disputed and your guide will say so; what is not disputed is that the mountain has supported a continuous community of practitioners for centuries, and that the schools at the foot of it teach a real curriculum. Your session runs about ninety minutes with an English-speaking instructor, on the forms rather than the fighting application: stance, weight transfer, and the first section of a bare-hand form, done slowly enough that someone who has never done it can follow. Wear flat shoes and clothes you can move in.

Lunch
At the foot of the mountain, a Taoist vegetarian table if the group wants it - the temple kitchens here cook without meat, without alliums and without strong spice, and the result is better than it sounds.

Afternoon - Taizipo and the way out
Taizipo, the Prince's Slope, is named for a legend about the young Zhenwu being pushed to give up his cultivation and the slope being the place it happened. The buildings are 1412: a hall, a scripture pavilion, and the famous Nine-Bend Wall, a zig-zag retaining wall climbing the slope whose purpose is structural but whose effect is to force you to slow down and approach the hall at an angle. The bracketing under the eaves is the thing to look at. From there the shuttle takes you down to the gate and your vehicle takes you to Shiyan East for the evening train.

Evening
Back in Wuhan by about nine. Dinner is on the train or late in Wuhan, depending on the departure.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuhan.

Morning - to Yichang
Yichang is where the Yangtze leaves the mountains and enters the plain, and it has been a garrison town and a port at the mouth of the gorges for two thousand years. The train from Wuhan is about two hours. Your guide has the dam visit pre-registered: the Three Gorges Dam site is free to enter but you must reserve, you must carry your passport, and you travel around the site on the official shuttle because private vehicles are not admitted to the restricted area.

Afternoon - the dam
The dam is 2,335 metres long and 185 metres tall, holding a reservoir that runs 660 kilometres back up the river. Construction started in 1994, the river was closed in 1997, the first generators ran in 2003, and the ship lift - the last major piece - opened in 2016. There are three viewpoints on the standard circuit. Tanziling looks down on the whole works from the south. The 185 platform is at the crest height of the dam, so you are standing level with the top of the wall, looking upstream into the reservoir and downstream over the spillway. And the memorial park at the downstream face gives you the scale of the spillway gates and the powerhouse.

The numbers your guide will give you are the ones worth having: 32 main turbines plus two plant-power units, a total installed capacity of 22,500 megawatts, and annual generation that has exceeded 100 terawatt-hours in a good year. The navigation works are the other half - a five-stage ship lock that passes vessels of up to 10,000 tonnes through a 113-metre change in level, and the vertical ship lift, which takes 3,000-tonne ships up the same height in about 40 minutes instead of three and a half hours. On the other side of the ledger: 1.3 million people were resettled, and the reservoir drowned towns, archaeological sites and a great deal of farmland. A good guide says both.

Evening
Back in Yichang for dinner on the river. The local fish - the Yangtze's own, now mostly farmed since the 2020 fishing ban on the main stem - and the red-oil noodles of Yichang are both on the table, and the guide orders a mild version alongside.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Yichang, riverside.

Morning - boarding and the Gezhouba lock
The "two dams and one gorge" route is the standard Yichang boat trip: you board below Gezhouba, pass through its lock, run up the Xiling Gorge, and finish at the approach to the Three Gorges Dam before returning. It is about eight hours in total and it is the best single day available in Hubei for seeing what the river actually looks like.

Locking through Gezhouba is worth waking up for: the chamber fills from below, you rise about 20 metres, and the gates open onto the next reach. It takes about 40 minutes and it is the same mechanism - simpler, smaller - that the big five-stage lock upstream uses on a far larger scale.

The Xiling Gorge
Xiling is the easternmost and longest of the Three Gorges, about 76 kilometres, and it is the one that keeps its cliffs after the 2003 impoundment raised the water by more than 100 metres. The walls rise 600 to 800 metres from the surface in places. You pass the Sanyou Cave on the north bank, where the poet Bai Juyi and his brother and Yuan Zhen all inscribed verses in 819; the Ming and Qing carvings on the cliffs above the water line; and the narrows where the river, before the dam, ran at five metres a second through a channel a hundred metres wide. The modern channel is wider, calmer and much less dramatic, and any honest guide will say that the dam took something out of the gorge as well as putting something in.

Lunch
On board. The boat serves a buffet; it is ordinary and included.

Afternoon
The boat comes up to the face of the Three Gorges Dam from downstream, which is the angle you cannot get from the land viewpoints: the whole 2,335-metre wall from below, with the spillway and the powerhouse at its foot, and the ship lock rising up the left bank in five steps. Then back downstream through Gezhouba, arriving in Yichang in the late afternoon.

Evening
Dinner in Yichang.

Meals
Lunch (on board), Dinner

Accommodation
Yichang, riverside.

Afternoon - boarding
You board at the Yichang passenger terminal in the late afternoon or evening. Cabins are assigned on arrival, luggage goes to the cabin, and there is a safety briefing and a welcome dinner. Your guide travels with you as far as the gangway, hands you over to the cruise staff, and stays in touch by telephone for the length of the sailing - they do not accompany the vessel itself, which is standard on the Yangtze.

The dam passage
Most upstream sailings pass the dam in the evening or overnight, either through the five-stage lock - about three and a half hours, five chambers, a 113-metre change in level - or through the ship lift, which takes about 40 minutes. Whichever it is, go up on deck. Going through the lock at night, with the chamber walls rising around you and the gates closing overhead, is the most physical way to understand what the dam does.

What the cabins are like
The vessels on this run are in the 100- to 300-passenger range, five decks, all cabins outside with either a window or a balcony, and the difference between the categories is size and balcony rather than service. Meals are buffet or set-menu in the dining room, and the shore excursions at the gorge stops are included in the fare. It is not a luxury product and it is not marketed as one; it is comfortable, and the scenery is the reason you are there.

Meals
Dinner on board

Accommodation
On board, cabin with private facilities.

Morning - the Shennong Stream
The Shennong Stream comes down from the mountains on the north bank near Badong and runs about 60 kilometres to the Yangtze. The excursion is by open wooden boat - the pea-pod boats the local boatmen still use - up a gorge narrow enough that at the top the walls are close overhead and the light comes down green. The stretch near the mouth is wider now that the reservoir has backed up; the upper reaches are as they were. There is singing from the banks, and there are the hauling tracks cut into the cliff from before the engines.

The Wu Gorge
Wu is the middle gorge, about 45 kilometres, and it is the one everybody agrees is the most beautiful: continuous walls, peaks that come up over 900 metres, and the cloud that hangs in the side valleys and gives the gorge its weather. The Twelve Peaks of Wushan are on the north bank, and the most photographed of them - the Goddess Peak, a slender rock column on the ridge - is the one the vessel will announce. Du Fu wrote about this water, and so did about a thousand other people; the guide on board will have the good ones.

Afternoon
Sailing, with the gorge opening and closing. There is usually a second shore stop - Wushan's small museum, or the new town built above the flood line after the reservoir - and the vessel passes into the Qutang Gorge at the western end by late afternoon.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner on board

Accommodation
On board.

Morning - the Qutang Gorge
Qutang is eight kilometres long, the shortest of the three, and the narrowest: the river runs between walls that in places are barely a hundred metres apart and rise well over a thousand. It is also the one the dam changed least, because the cliffs are too high to be drowned. The entrance is the Kuimen gate, the rock portal that appears on the back of the old ten-yuan note, and passing it in the early morning with the light still low is the best hour of the whole sailing.

The White Emperor City
Above the western entrance, on a peninsula at Fengjie, stands Baidicheng - the White Emperor City - named for a Han usurper who declared himself the White Emperor here in the first century. The site has been fortified since at least the Han, and the buildings on it now are Qing and later, moved up above the reservoir line when the water came. It is famous for two things: Liu Bei, the founder of Shu Han, died here in 223 after his defeat at Yiling; and Li Bai left from here downstream in 759 and wrote the poem about setting off in the morning through the cloud-coloured gorges with the monkeys calling on both banks - the one every Chinese schoolchild learns.

The site is reached by a long covered escalator from the landing stage, which is itself an artefact of the reservoir: the old stair is 60 metres under water.

Afternoon
Back on board for the last stretch. Most vessels run an afternoon excursion to a tributary or a shore village and hold a farewell dinner that evening.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner on board

Accommodation
On board.

Morning - disembarkation
The vessel ties up at Chongqing in the morning, usually before nine, and you are off after breakfast. Your Hubei guide, or a Chongqing colleague if you have booked the onward leg with us, meets you at the gangway.

Chongqing, briefly
Chongqing is not Hubei, but if you have the day: it is a city of about 32 million in the municipality, built on rock above the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing, with a climate that produces fog for most of the winter and a skyline that photographs better than any other in China. The worthwhile half-day is the old town at Hongyadong, the Three Gorges Museum, the Great Hall of the People on Renmin Square, and E'ling Park for the view over the two rivers. The food is the real reason: Chongqing hotpot, in which the oil is the point and the numbing Sichuan pepper is not negotiable - though a mild pot can be arranged.

Lunch and onward
Lunch, then the transfer to Chongqing Jiangbei airport or Chongqing North railway station. High-speed trains run to Chengdu in about an hour and a half, to Xi'an in about five, and to Beijing in about eight.

Meals
Breakfast (on board), Lunch

Accommodation
Not included