Three Gorges

The Three Gorges are the most celebrated stretch of the Yangtze, the point where China's greatest river forces its way through the Wu Mountains between Chongqing and Hubei. From west to east they are the Qutang Gorge, only about 8 km long but the narrowest and most dramatic; the Wu Gorge, around 45 km of winding passage beneath forested peaks; and the Xiling Gorge, some 66 km long, ending at Nanjin Pass near Yichang. The gorges were carved as the land slowly rose and the river kept cutting down through it, and their character changes with the rock: sheer, narrow walls where the river passes through hard limestone, wider valleys where it meets softer sandstone and shale.

The western entrance, Kuimen Gate, where the river squeezes between two mountains at the start of Qutang Gorge, is the image printed on the ten-yuan banknote, and above it stands Baidicheng, the White Emperor City, associated with Liu Bei of the Three Kingdoms period. The gorges have been praised in Chinese literature for well over a thousand years. The geographer Li Daoyuan, writing under the Northern Wei dynasty, described cliffs so high that the sun showed only at noon, and the Tang poet Li Bai wrote of leaving Baidicheng and speeding past thousands of mountains to the cries of monkeys on both banks. Among the twelve peaks of the Wu Mountains, one is known as Fairy Peak, said in folk tradition to be a fairy who helped Yu the Great tame the floods and guided boatmen.

For centuries the gorges were also one of the most dangerous waterways in China, their rapids and whirlpools negotiated by boats hauled upstream by teams of trackers on towpaths cut into the rock. The Three Gorges Dam, built at Sandouping in the Xiling Gorge and completed in 2008, transformed them: the reservoir raised the water level, widened the river and made the mountains look lower, and many riverside towns and archaeological sites were relocated or submerged. Yet the cliffs still tower above the water, and a passage through Qutang in particular remains one of the great river landscapes of the world.

Getting there

The gorges begin at Baidicheng in Fengjie County, Chongqing, about 3.3 km from Baidi; the nearest airport to that western entrance is Enshi Xujiaping Airport (ENH), about 80.4 km away. The classic way to see them is by river cruise between Chongqing and Yichang, which takes about four days downstream and five upstream; many cruises stop at Fengjie for a visit to Baidicheng.