Qutang Gorge

Qutang is the shortest and the most dramatic of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze. In only about 8 km the great river forces its way between mountains whose walls rise as high as 1,200 metres, and at its narrowest point the channel is just 150 metres wide. The entrance to the gorge, known as Kuimen, is formed by two mountains facing each other across the water, Chijia to the north and Baiyan to the south, standing like the posts of a gigantic gate.

At the upstream end of the gorge stands Baidicheng, the White Emperor City, an ancient fortress town on a hill above the river. It is remembered as the place where Liu Bei, one of the great figures of the Three Kingdoms period, died, and memorial temples there keep his story alive. For centuries the passage of the gorge was a feat of labour: in the Han dynasty a path was cut along the cliffs for the haulers who dragged boats upstream against the current, and a line of rectangular holes in the rock face, known as the Meng Liang Stairway, records another early attempt to climb the walls. On the southern cliff, a surface called the Chalk Wall carried around a thousand carved characters left by calligraphers, the oldest of them from the Song dynasty.

The gorge also holds stranger traces. High on the cliffs are hanging coffins, placed there according to the funerary customs of the ancient Bo people, and named rocks such as Hanging Monk Rock and a spring called Drinking Phoenix Spring add to its store of legends. Since the completion of the Three Gorges Dam downstream, the river has risen considerably, covering many of the lower sites, including the haulers' path, the Meng Liang Stairway and the Chalk Wall, but the cliffs of Kuimen still frame the river as they have for millennia.

Getting there

Qutang Gorge begins at Baidicheng, about 3 km from the town of Baidi, in Fengjie County of Chongqing municipality. The nearest airport is Enshi Xujiaping Airport (ENH), about 81 km away.