Down the Yangtze, through gorges the dam rewrote

Asia's longest river runs some six thousand kilometres from the Tibetan plateau to the East China Sea, and for most of that distance it does what large rivers do: it widens, slows and carries the bulk of a nation's trade and irrigation on its back. For one stretch, though, between Chongqing and Yichang, the Yangtze narrows and drops through a run of limestone gorges, Qutang, Wu and Xiling, where cliffs rise sheer from the water and the current used to run fast enough to sink boats attempting the passage upstream. This is the stretch that itineraries combining Beijing, Xi'an and Chengdu tend to break for, swapping coach seats for a cabin and letting the scenery do more of the work than a road ever could.

A river reshaped by the largest dam on Earth

Near Yichang, at the gorges' eastern end, sits the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric power station in the world by installed capacity, completed in stages between 2003 and 2012. Its reservoir raised the water level behind it by well over a hundred metres in places, drowning towns, farmland and a number of archaeological sites, and required the resettlement of well over a million people, one of the largest engineering-driven relocations in modern history. It also tamed the gorges' famous rapids: the cliffs are as dramatic as they ever were, but the boiling, dangerous current that made the passage a byword for hazardous travel is largely gone, replaced by a slower, navigable stretch of water that a modern cruise vessel can sail in comfort rather than trepidation.

What the gorges still look like

Despite the dam, the scenery through the Three Gorges remains among the most striking river scenery in China: near-vertical cliffs, temples and pagodas positioned on ledges that seem barely accessible, and the occasional side excursion by smaller boat into narrower tributary gorges where the walls close in further still. The Xiling Gorge, closest to the dam, shows the clearest evidence of the changed water level, with markers along the banks indicating the old water line against the new. It is not a landscape untouched by engineering, and a good itinerary does not pretend otherwise; it is a landscape shaped twice, once by geology and once by an enormous modern project, and both versions are visible if you know where to look.

Locks, not portage

Ships pass the dam itself through a system of locks, a slow and genuinely interesting piece of engineering to watch in its own right: vessels are raised or lowered through a series of chambers over several hours, a process that gives passengers an unhurried close-up view of a structure normally seen only from photographs. It is one of the few points on an escorted tour of China where the itinerary itself, rather than a sight visited from it, becomes the thing worth watching.

Where the cruise sits in a longer trip

These river days are rarely the whole holiday; they tend to sit inside a longer land tour that also takes in Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi'an and Beijing, using the boat as the connective stretch between Chongqing in the west and Yichang further downstream rather than as a destination in itself. That structure suits the river well. A cruise built entirely around the Yangtze would ask a great deal of a stretch of water that, however striking, is essentially one long gorge; folded into a wider circuit of China's ancient capitals, it works instead as a change of gear, a few days where the view comes to the traveller rather than the other way round.

Spring and autumn suit the gorges best, avoiding both the summer haze that can dull the cliffs and the coldest, greyest weeks of winter. The water level, and with it the exact view from the deck, varies through the year according to how the dam's reservoir is being managed, which is one more way the modern engineering keeps making itself known on an otherwise very old river.