We boarded a boat and started our trip up the Yangtze River. After negotiating the first of the three gorges, the Xiling Gorge or “gate to hell’ as described by Chinese boatmen, we had a ship board lecture and learned a lot about the Yangtze River, the reasoning for the dam, the life of people living along this portion of the river, and the displacement of well over a million people who live along this portion of the river.

One main reason for the dam was flooding. Our lecturer said that in 1870, the Yangtze flooded and killed about 300,000 people. A major flooding happened again in 1930/1931. In 1998, flooding killed 1,462 people and caused some $20 Billion in damage. These numbers seemed incredible to me until I saw the Yangtze River. I will point out two main features regarding flooding. First, the banks of the river are incredibly steep. The lecturer said that the record for the river rising in one day of heavy rain is 66 feet. That’s an enormous rise of water for one day of rain. But it is understandable when you see the steepness of the banks and then understand that the Yangtze has over 770 tributaries. Put those two facts together and I can readily understand how so many people can drown in a major flood. You can see this in the first two photos.

Our lecturer said that on the island in the middle of the Yangtze where the dam is being built, they found relics and artifacts 8,000 to 10,000 years old. We saw caves and old physical markers as we passed along the river, so the project will bury a lot of history. The next photo is a cave and we saw lots of them along the river. The photo after is an old walkway made in the rocks along the river used to physically tow, by rope, boats up river.

There will be lots of agriculture displaced as we found quite a bit of farming along this section of the river. The first photo below is primarily row crops. The second photo is orange and tangerine groves and those citrus did very well along this section of the river. I would hate to be the person to have to harvest those citrus on that steep hillside.

The lecturer also said that the dam will displace some 1.3 million or more people along the river. They will have to move to higher ground. They will have a choice of moving to an apartment up above or to some other location where they will hopefully be able to farm, if they are farmers. I believe that the next two photos were the town of Wushan which had existed since the Shang dynasty (1600 – 1027 BCE). It’s population was 30,000 people and the whole town had to be torn down and moved farther up the hills. It was a strange sight to see. People were working furiously to meet the deadline for the dam to become functional and the flooding to start.

We also took a side trip by riding a sampan up the Daning River and through the lesser gorges: the Dragon Gate gorge, Misty gorge, and Emerald Green gorge. The water was clean and clear. We could hear birds chirping. We saw monkeys half way up the gorge. The rock face had rows of square holes, remnants of a plank walkway used to access salt mines up river that date back to 246 BC. In Misty Gorge, we saw a hanging coffin way up on the cliff that we were told was a relic of the Ba People from 3,500 years ago. It looked like a beautiful place to live but probably a very difficult place to live.

The last photo was just one I took late on our last day on the Yangtze River before we reached Chongqing.