4-Day Wuhan, Jingzhou and Yichang: from Chu to the Gorges

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 - to Jingzhou
Jingzhou sits on the north bank of the Yangtze about 200 kilometres west of Wuhan, and for most of the first millennium BC it was Ying, the capital of Chu - the southern state that controlled the middle Yangtze, fought the northern states for three centuries, and produced an art and a literature unlike anything in the Zhou heartland. Qu Yuan was a Chu minister; the Chu ci poems are Chu; the lacquer and silk and bronze that come out of the ground here are Chu.

The Jingzhou Museum
The museum is one of the best prefectural museums in China and it is free, by reservation. What it holds is largely from the tombs around the old city: a remarkably preserved male corpse from the Western Han with the silk shroud and the grave inventory intact, lacquerware with the gloss still on it, bamboo slips with administrative text, and a large collection of Chu bronze and jade. The silk and lacquer are the point - the waterlogged ground here preserved organic material that has rotted everywhere else, which is why the textile collection is better than most national ones. Allow two hours.

Lunch
Jingzhou cooks fish better than anywhere in Hubei, and the local specialities are fish cake - yu gao - and fish balls, both made from the same pounded surimi and both steamed. Your guide orders a fish table, plus the braised river turtle if the group wants it, and something unspiced.

Afternoon - the city wall
The wall of Jingzhou is one of the few complete city walls left in the Yangtze plain, and the line has been held since at least the third century, though the standing brick is Ming and Qing, rebuilt on the old footings. You walk a stretch on top, which is where the geography becomes obvious: the wall, the moat outside it, the river to the south, and the flat wet rice country in every other direction. The north gate and the drum tower are the two structures that survive above the wall line.

Late afternoon - onward
Drive or train west to Yichang, about one and a half hours, arriving in time for dinner at the river.

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.

Morning - the ship lift
The vertical ship lift at the Three Gorges Dam opened in 2016 after nearly a decade of construction, and it is the most interesting piece of machinery on the river. Where the five-stage lock takes a vessel about three and a half hours to pass the 113-metre difference in level, the lift does it in around 40 minutes: the ship enters a chamber 120 metres long, 18 metres wide and 3.5 metres deep, gates close, and the chamber - with the ship and about 15,000 tonnes of water in it - is raised or lowered by a rack-and-pinion drive with no counterweight, so the machine is lifting the whole thing.

The passenger experience is simply that you board a boat below the dam, ride the chamber up or down, and come out the other side. It is worth doing if your schedule allows, because it is the only way to feel the height difference rather than read it. Your guide books it in advance; capacity is limited and it is suspended in bad weather and during maintenance windows.

Lunch and departure
Lunch, and then the transfer to Yichang East for the high-speed train - Wuhan in about two hours, Chongqing in about three - or to Yichang airport.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Not included