5-Day Yichang in Depth: the Dam, the Gorges and Qu Yuan

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.

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 - to Zigui
Zigui county is about an hour upstream from Yichang and it is where Qu Yuan was born, around 340 BC. He was a minister of Chu, he was exiled after being slandered at court, and he drowned himself in the Miluo river in 278 BC when the Qin took the Chu capital. The dragon-boat races and the zongzi of the fifth lunar month are both his memorial, and they have been for more than two thousand years.

The Qu Yuan Temple
The temple was first built in the Tang, and the version you see standing was moved: the original site was drowned by the reservoir, and the complex was relocated to higher ground at Fenghuang Shan in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, with the halls rebuilt and the stelae and the old stone carried up. It sits above the water with the dam downstream and the new Zigui town below. The main hall, the memorial arch and the coffin chamber are laid out on a rising axis, and the collection of stelae - inscriptions from the Song onwards - is the substance of the place.

The Three Gorges Project Museum
Inside the dam site zone, the museum covers the works in engineering detail: the geology of the gorge, the diversion and closure of the river, the concrete placement rates, the turbine design, the ship lock and the lift, and the resettlement programme. It is the best single place to get the numbers straight after you have stood on the dam itself, and it is free with the same site reservation.

Lunch and departure
Lunch in Zigui - the local speciality is the navel orange the county grows on the reservoir terraces, and the fish - then the drive down to Yichang East or to the airport for an onward train or flight.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Not included

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