From Xian, we flew to Wuhan and then drove six hours to Sandouping and the Yangtze River. From there we boarded a boat for a trip upstream from the dam on the Yangtze.

But before we started our river cruise, we visited the Three Gorges Dam, then still under construction. We spent several hours at the dam site but it was a huge project and we only got a small glimpse of the entire project. The dam is some 7,660 feet long and 607 feet high. It was a monster of a construction site at over 17 square miles with some 28,000 workers on the project.

The following is information that we heard from our guides or that we read on information displays. I found this project fascinating and of course, it was highly controversial for a number of reasons. The dam was proposed by Sun Yat Sen in 1919. American engineers picked this site for construction in 1944. Concerns and problems delayed construction for over forty years until around 1990. It was the largest dam in the world when constructed and projected to cost $28 Billion US dollars. The dam was built with a double-lane 5 stage lock system and also a water elevator system. The lock system was expected to take three hours to pass but the elevator, for small boats, only thirty minutes. The dam was expected to produce 10 to 15 percent of China’s power needs when completed. It was also expected to reduce the river flooding by 90 percent and greatly increase both navigation capabilities and irrigation for farmers.

Again, the dam project is enormous. The amounts of rock being quarried, crushed, and moved was staggering. We crossed the Sanxia-Yangtze Bridge and went to several of the main observation points. We got good looks at the dam, the locks, the elevator, the rock filled cofferdam for ship passage, landscaping for the completed project, and saw a model of the entire project. We also saw enough rock to last me a lifetime. Power production and the second phase of the dam was scheduled for completion shortly after we were here.

I’ve included a few photos just to give a small glimpse of our visit to the dam under construction.

Below was one of the most fascinating things that we saw at the dam site. The engineers needed to determine how they would stop the flow of the Yangtze River to divert it. With the steep mountains, it was not an easy task. They needed a way to dump something in that would form a barrier and stop the water. The design that they came up with and that worked was pieces formed in the shape below. With Vicky standing there, you can also see that they are big chunks of concrete.

The dam is a very complete project. They had done quite a bit of landscaping already, despite it still being a major construction site. We were lucky to be here when many trees were in bloom.