8-Day Wuhan, Yichang and the Yangtze: City, Dam and 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 - Hubei Provincial Museum
The museum sits beside East Lake in Wuchang and it is free, which means it is also crowded: entry is by timed reservation and your guide holds it in advance, usually for the first slot of the day. The building you want is the one housing the finds from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, excavated at Leigudun near Suizhou in 1978. The marquis died around 433 BC and was buried with 65 bronze bells hung on a wooden frame, each of them tuned to two notes, together with the inscription that records the pitch names in use at the time.

The bells were cast with a precision that still works: they were played after excavation, and recordings exist, and the museum has them under glass with the rack reconstructed at full height. Around them are the rest of the grave - bronze vessels weighing hundreds of kilograms, the marquis's coffin set inside a larger outer one, and a gold vessel with a lid. The other half of the collection is Chu: lacquer from the southern state that dominated the middle Yangtze for eight centuries, silk, and the jade and bronze of a culture whose art is stranger and more writhing than anything coming out of the north at the same moment. Allow two and a half hours, and accept that the chime-bell hall gets loud.

Lunch
Hubei is a province of lakes and rivers and the cooking follows: lotus root in soup, steamed Wuchang fish, and the braised pork rib and lotus root stew that appears on every table in Wuhan in autumn. Your guide orders a spread that is heavy on fish and light on chilli, with a separate plate of something unspiced for anyone who needs it.

Afternoon - East Lake
East Lake covers about 33 square kilometres and is the largest urban lake in China by water area. The part worth your afternoon is the south shore: the greenway that runs under the old plane trees to Moshui Lake, the causeways, and the lotus beds that are at their best in July and August. You take a boat across rather than driving around, which is both quicker and the reason people come. On the far side, the Hubei Museum of Fine Arts and the sculpture park are optional and usually skipped.

Evening
Dinner in Wuchang. If the season is right - late March into early April - Wuhan University's cherry avenue is ten minutes from the lake and worth an hour of daylight; your guide will tell you whether the trees are out and whether the campus is open to visitors that week.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, Wuhan.

Morning - the former concessions
After the Second Opium War, Hankou was opened as a treaty port, and by the 1900s the riverfront here was run by five separate foreign administrations with their own police, their own tram lines and their own building codes. The architecture is still standing. Along Yanjiang Avenue you get the Russian and French trading houses, the German consulate, and the block-long British municipal buildings, all in a grey brick and stone that has weathered badly in a good way. Your guide walks the riverfront first for the plan of it - concessions laid out perpendicular to the river, each with its own bund - and then goes inland to the side streets where the interiors have been turned into cafes and small shops without the facades being touched.

The Customs House
The Jianghan Customs House of 1924 is the building that dominates the bund, with a clock tower that still keeps time and bells that are rung on the hour. It is a museum now, and the collection is mostly documentary: the trade ledgers, the river charts, and the photographs of the bund under foreign management. Half an hour is enough, and the view from the upper floor over the river and the confluence with the Han is the reason to go up.

Lunch
In the concessions: the area is full of small restaurants in old buildings, and your guide picks one for a Hubei table - fish balls from Jingzhou, dried bean curd, and the steamed dishes that the province does better than anywhere, mianyang san zheng, three things steamed together in one steamer.

Afternoon - the 1911 Revolution
On 10 October 1911 a bomb being assembled in the Russian concession exploded early, the police raided, found the membership lists of the revolutionary cell, and the mutiny that followed began not as a plan but as a way out of being arrested. By the following morning Wuchang was in rebel hands, and within two months the Qing had gone. The museum on the Wuchang side covers it with documents rather than dioramas, and the red-brick parliament building next door - the "red house" - is where the provisional government sat. Across the street, the bronze of Sun Yat-sen faces the square. Your guide runs the sequence in the order it happened, which makes the accident of it much clearer than any summary does.

Evening
Jiqing Street or the Hankou riverfront for dinner; the night market here is older and less polished than the one in Wuchang, and the crayfish and the grilled fish are the same.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, 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.

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