4-Day Yichang: the Dam, the Gorge Folk and the Clear River

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 - to the site
The Three Gorges Tribe scenic area sits on the south bank inside the Xiling Gorge, and you reach it by ferry from the transfer pier, which is part of the point: the approach up the gorge is by water. The site is a folk museum in the open air - buildings moved or rebuilt, people working in them, and the landscape doing the rest.

The Longjin Stream
The spine of the site is the Longjin, a short stream that comes down to the Yangtze through a narrow, vertical-walled side valley. Along it: Tujia stilted houses - diaojiaolou - built out from the slope on timber posts, water mills and trip-hammers still turning, fishing platforms with cormorants, and the boat-haulers' track cut into the cliff above the water. The Tujia are one of the two big ethnic groups of this corner of Hubei and the south-west, and the site is the easiest place to see their building tradition without driving another six hours to Enshi.

There is singing, and it is not fake: the Tujia work songs and the antiphonal courting songs are a real tradition, and the performers are mostly from the area. There is also a wedding re-enactment and a lot of costume, which is where the site tips into showmanship, and your guide will tell you which parts are reconstructed and which are not.

Lunch
Inside the site. The food is Tujia: hezha, the ground-soybean and vegetable pot that is the staple of the region, smoked pork, and the potato that Enshi and the mountain counties eat instead of rice. A mild table is ordered as well.

Afternoon
Back on the water, up the side valley and out to the main channel, with the gorge walls on both sides. Return to the pier and drive back to Yichang.

Evening
Dinner in Yichang.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Yichang, riverside.

Morning - south to the Qingjiang
The Qingjiang rises in the mountains of the south-west, runs about 423 kilometres and joins the Yangtze at Yidu below Yichang. It carries far less sediment than the Yangtze, which is why it is the "clear river", and the reservoirs built on it in the 1990s and 2000s have turned the middle reaches into a drowned valley of remarkable colour - green in summer, blue-green in autumn, and standing in every shade between in the side bays.

The boat
The route runs from the dam at Geheyan up through the gorges to the Tujia settlement areas. The walls are lower and greener than the Yangtze gorges and the scale is smaller, which is the whole appeal. Along the way: waterfalls that come down the cliffs after rain, terraced fields, fish cages, and the villages where the Tujia and the Miao of the region live. The boat stops at a couple of points - usually the Wuluo Zhongli Shan cultural site and a singing stage - and your guide will tell you which stops are worth the dock and which are worth staying on board for.

Lunch
On the shore, a Tujia table: hezha, smoked pork, the oily tea soup that is drunk here rather than brewed, and river fish from the reservoir. A mild version is ordered as well.

Afternoon
Back downriver and the drive to Yichang. If the season is right, the tea terraces above the road out are worth a twenty-minute stop.

Evening
Dinner in Yichang.

Meals
Lunch, 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