The Yangtze River is synonymous with a visit to China, and the damming of this mighty river to create the world's biggest dam has inevitably created controversy.

Such debate has meant than more tourists than ever have flocked to see this great river - and its best known sights, the Three Gorges, before the river is dammed.

The Chang Jiang (Long River) is the world's third longest river, spilling into the East China Sea just north of Shanghai. With its headwaters high in the Tibet Plateau, on the edge of the Himalayas the Yangtze flows 6,300 kilometres through the heartland of China.

We arrive brimming with indignation and prepared for environmental catastrophe, believing guidebook claims that the famous Three Gorges would be completely submerged!

Like many foreign tourists we were too willing to condemn the Chinese for undertaking a construction already considered a white elephant.

China is cursed when it comes to flooding – geography, climate and timing all mean that when floods hit, they do with absolute devastation.  Thousands of homes can be destroyed, and 150,000 people lost in one flood. Worse still, the rich alluvial plains vital to feeding China’s 1.3 billion people are rendered useless for that year. 

The Sandouping Dam site is an hour’s drive from Yichang along a double lane concrete highway which ploughs its way through the steep mountainside with multitudes of tunnels, including China’s longest at 3.6km. The road to the dam site is an engineering feat, just one example of Chinese determination to conquer their environment.

The dam construction site itself is awesome.  Massive concrete walls nearly 200m high tower above us, and we are amazed by series of locks and lifts that will convey the shipping traffic through the Yangtze, one of China's main transportation arteries.
The dam will be almost 2 kilometres wide and we can see how “foreign experts” could have concerns about safety logistics!

Chinese propaganda is clear: the dam is being built to reduce the devastating effects of flooding downstream. In addition, the Chinese have ambitious plans for a hydroelectric project which will produce about 10% of all of China's power.

There is plenty of choice when it comes to choosing a Yangtze Cruise - depending on your itinerary, taste and budget.  You can book while in China, but purchasing your tour at home may alleviate some of the on tour hassles we enjoyed on our purple palace, the Taiwanese owned Marco Polo, where we were the only English speaking people on board.
We were awoken at about 3am by a shrieking Chinese voice over the P.A. and groggily staggered onto deck with a group of equally dishevelled Taiwanese. Through sleep deprived eyes we first pass through the locks of the Gezhouba Dam, completed in 1980 as a precursor to the Three Gorges Dam. It never delivered the expected benefits.

At daybreak our slumber is again shattered by another piercing announcement piped at full pitch, and we totter up on deck to pass through the spectacular 70km long Xiling Gorge, towering above us.

In the afternoon we dock in Wushan where we are transferred to small longboat for a journey up the Lesser Three Gorges. 

The DaNing River’s sparkling clear water is a pleasant change from the muddy amber of the Yangtze, and with breathtaking deep canyons dwarfing us, just as impressive.  

We paddle in the shallows of one of the gorges, and admire the brightly coloured pebbles smoothed by thousands of tonnes of water, and enjoy the chatter of monkeys high in the rocky cliffs.

Our trip downstream is fleet as we negotiate rapids as the waters of the DaNang race to join the massive Yangtze. We pass by small fishermen casting their nets, children frolicking in the shallows, and goats being herded home in the late afternoon sun.

Qutang Gorge is stunning in the golden light of sunrise, towering up above the Yangtze to a height of 2100m.

Evenly spaced symmetrical holes along the side of the canyon were once a plank road.  The Yangtze River has carved its way through a craggy mountain range that caused transport delays for traders, and so with Chinese ingenuity they circumvented this problem.  They drilled holes into the rockface of the river canyon, enabling them to balance wooden planks alongside the river and therefore create a road!

Travelling on a boat gives you the opportunity to observe life on the riverbanks.  An entire lounge suite is perched on the sand at the edge of the river, and our eyes follow up the steep river banks to where a little man hauls a lounge chair up a rockface where there seems to be no path.

Along the length of the river are enormous signs with flooding levels marked – 135 metres (2003), and in 2009, 175 metres.

The Yangtze seems vital to these people living alongside the river, to whom it is evidently a lifeblood. We wonder their fate once the damming occurs in 2003, displacing millions of people.

In addition to safety concerns and loss of historical relics, its is such forced displacement of people has raised eyebrows in western democracies.

The Chinese are quick to point out that those affected will be adequately compensated.  Take the farmers whom we watch tilling the steep slopes - they will be offered the exactly same size of land in another location. Or, if they chose they can move to a city apartment the same size as their existing house, and be retrained as a factory worker. 

The many cities nestled on the banks of the Yangtze are also provided for.  The government has built brand new white tile cities clear of the dam waters. It is sobering to see these colourless cities perched high up on the hills, sterile and unlived in.  Below, hugging the waterline are dilapidated rust coloured and brown apartment blocks, crammed together in haphazard squalor.

Young people, liking new modern things, tell us they are looking forward to the move, whereas the older people say that they will wait to the last moment to move because the old cities are where all their memories are.  

Ming Shan (Ming Mountain) is an obligatory stop during every Yangtze River Cruise, and although the dam will affect hundreds of holy sites, Ming Shan’s brash bold statues will be unaffected.

Curiously this holy shrine combines Taoism, Buddhism, with a dash of Confucianism thrown in. Overlaying this religious base is thousands of years of Chinese folklore, and also the ‘ten bad years’ in China when all worshipping was done secretly.

The Chinese people have survived through a turbulent twentieth century and its not likely that their resilience or determination will alter in these early years of the twenty first century.

The shores become far off in the distance as we near the great inland port of Chongqing, clustered at the confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze Rivers. It’s known as one of the hottest cities in China, not least because of the layer of smog trapping in the heat.

Clustered around the steep riverbanks, Chongqing is curiously devoid of bicycle bells, and strangely silent due to a law banning the beeping of horns. With tortuously winding steep streets most transportation is still done by coolies balancing all kinds of goods on a pole across their wiry shoulders.

Our journey was an awakening, where we learnt that using Western standards is not necessarily the most appropriate way to consider a project like the damming the great Yangtze River. You have to do it yourself to decide.

Copyright Ariana Svenson, 2005 - Comments and enquiries, please email us.