The Three Gorges Dam in Hubei Province, China is part of the largest hydropower facility in the world.
I work in the power sector. I have lived in China for 15 years. I visit the province where the dam is several times a year to visit in-laws. And yet…until just a few months ago, I had never been to the dam.
Thankfully, I have now corrected that, as part of my recent trip to Yichang (catch up on that visit here).
The 3GD is a very cool site visit. Aside from being a massive hydroelectric generation and flood control facility, it’s also a national 5A tourist attraction with multiple onsite museums. With free entry and just 35 CNY for the (mandatory) shuttle bus, it’s also cheap, and total worth a visit if you happen to find yourself in central China. Here’s how I got here, what I saw, and what I thought
This essay was first posted to Twitter as a thread on 27 June 2026. It has been edited lightly for long-essay format.
The Three Gorges Dam is in Zigui County (秭归县), about 50km west of Yichang City proper. As a power generation facility, it boasts 32 main turbines at 700 MW, plus two smaller turbines for house load, for a total of 22,500 MW (22.5 GW) of installed capacity. It is the largest in the world.
Fully completed in 2012, it now produces roughly 100 TWh a year, equal to the annual power generation of a mid-sized country (but only ~1% of China's annual power use).
But power generation isn’t its only function. Actually, that’s not even its primary function, as I would learn during my visit.
As a water management facility, the Three Gorges Reservoir has a surface area of ~1000 square km and a holding capacity of ~39 cubic km of water. The reservoir behind the 181m dam stretches 600 km up the Yangtze River, beyond the Hubei provincial border and even extending back west to regions of Chongqing. We can only see one small part of it at Zigui County, i.e., the lake-like portion that formed immediately behind the dam.
In recognition of its dual purpose of flood control and power generation, its full proper name is “The Yangtze River Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project” 长江三峡水利枢纽工程, but in practice it’s almost always shortened to “The Three Gorges Project” (三峡工程) in Chinese.
Zigui County is administered by Yichang, but it’s still a good distance upriver. You can get there from Yichang via bus or self-driving, but if you have a Chinese driver’s license, I really recommend driving. There's a provincial highway (the S48) running between the two cities that'll get you there in less than an hour, but the slower National Road G348 has better views and also a few scenic viewpoints where you can park and take pictures. G348 is a fairly new road (opened in just 2023) that connects Wuhan to Dali, and the Yichang section already has a reputation for its great scenery, so that’s the route I decided to take.
Leaving Yichang on the G348, there is hardly any transition from the built urban landscape to natural forests and cliffs - it happens immediately. Yichang is already partially built on a hillside, so the road leaving the city turns quite smoothly into a cliffside road following the gorges rising along the river.
As I got on my way, it was 8am and I needed caffeine. Fortunately, at the first scenic turnoff I found a bright teal coffee van with a barista just setting up for the morning.
She told me she owns a brick and mortar coffee shop in Yichang too, but the coffee business is too competitive in the cities and big chains like Luckin are driving prices down too much, so she got this mobile coffee van to snag the tourist traffic on the G348 (notice she has the route drawn on the vehicle windows).
I wholly embrace this recent trend along China’s national roads. It’s easy to find coffee everywhere now - and it wasn’t always the case!
On the edge of a forested river gorge, we chatted about coffee market dynamics in China while she prepared my drink. The conversation turned to Chinese Yunnan coffee beans - becoming more popular every year among coffee lovers.
She told me it’s basically impossible to secure a stable supply of Yunnan beans these days unless you have a direct relationship with a plantation owner there, since they are so popular and demand is so high. The bigger chains are also starting to ride the trend of interest in Yunnan beans and their demand is creating scarcity in the market. Meanwhile, it takes at least 5 years to get new plantations producing, so the supply can’t possibly expand as rapidly as demand.
We laughed over the irony of her having no problem sourcing beans from global coffee regions like Yirgacheffe, Sumatra, and Panama, while struggling to get beans from China.
There was a bike packer with a tent set up behind her coffee van. They hadn’t gotten up yet, but I was impressed how far they had apparently ridden up these mountains on the previous day.
I thanked the barista for my coffee and headed on my way. A few minutes further down the road, I stopped at another scenic valley lookout which had a walkway extending over the lush gorge. It had just finished raining and the mists rolling gently over the forested mountains were perfectly atmospheric for the moment.
I bought some grilled baby potatoes tossed with seasonings from two elderly locals. They told me they've had good business selling snacks and trinkets at this lookout point since the G348 opened two years ago. Their village is down in the gorge I had just been overlooking.
After crossing the ridge, the road dumps out next to the Yangtze for the approach to Zigui County. The view across the opposite bank is dramatic, with terraced fields and houses rising up the side of choppy karst-like outcroppings.
Entering the Three Gorges area proper, I had to register with a police checkpoint, so if you go, make sure you bring your ID and the vehicle permit (I had to ask the rental company to send me a copy of this on WeChat, as it wasn't in the car already). It’s not military territory, but it's critical infrastructure, so you get checkpoints, armed police (武警), and controlled access. Once I registered, I got a yellow temporary certificate to put on my dashboard to clear the checkpoints. But the registration process itself was quick and painless. No photos of that part, for obvious reasons.
And then I was into the dam area. I parked the car, ignored the touts in the parking lot (they wanted to charge me extra for parking, or try to get me to buy a ticket to a free attraction) and headed straight into the tourism center. I bought an inexpensive (but mandatory) touring bus ticket and headed in.
There are also options to pair your visit with a river cruise, or a package ticket with other attractions in Zigui, but I stuck to just the dam this time.
The first scenic spot is an elevated lookout point called Tanzi Ridge Park (坛子岭公园) on an island separating the main dam/reservoir section and the ship lock section. It had just finished rainy, so it was still pretty misty, but it made the environment very atmospheric.
To the southwest, you can see the dam and the reservoir, as well as Zigui County and Quyuan Park on the opposite bank.
To the north, you can see over the ship lock mechanism, with allows for two-way traffic of 10k-ton vessels across five sequential lock chambers, resulting in an elevation differential of ~100m between the reservoir and the river continuing below. I'm not even really a boat guy, but I could have spent quite a while watching the vessels navigate the locks.
Local calligrapher and fourth-gen painter Xi Yongqin (习永钦) has a booth at the gift shop at Tanziling. He specializes in ink finger paintings (指墨画) of the Three Gorges Region.
“I’ve been painting for over 50 years, and painting the Three Gorges for over 30 years” he told me with pride.
He's fairly famous (he has a Baidu Baike page) and is semi-retired now, but still teaches and sells framed pieces while doing quick sketches for tourists. I bought one framed piece and he added another a quick sketch and some postcard calligraphy.
"You've been painting the same subject for 30 years? Don't do you get sick of it?" I asked.
"Only if it's not appreciated by anyone. As long as someone appreciates it, I feel good to paint it. I saw you liked it, so it gave me energy too." He was a super nice guy, happily posing for pictures and asking for a picture together as well.
The tour continued on foot down to the next sightseeing stop - roughly level with the dam itself. The best photo opportunities are here, and you get a chance to appreciate how truly massive the thing is. You can assess the reservoir’s water level with these concrete pillars. When I was there, it was very low, awaiting usage as a sponge to absorb water from upstream.
Next, it was back on the sightseeing bus to cross to the opposite bank to visit the Three Gorges Project museum.
The museum was quite good, tracing the history that led to the decision to build the dam. I learned that the flood-management capabilities of the dam and reservoir are actually the main intended functions of the dam, with power generation only secondary.
Generally, the worst flooding in the Yangtze River basin happened when there was a major storm or spring snowmelt that put the Yangtze at very high levels and left it unable to absorb any more water. Then, when the spring rains came, its tributaries would be unable to dump their water into the Yangtze and end up bursting their banks somewhere else.
The Yangtze’s main stem itself also could flood, but actually the most destructive flood events were more often associated with its tributaries that were unable to drain into the Yangtze when it was full itself.
There hasn’t been a major catastrophic flooding event in the Yangtze region since 1997, a year before the dam started construction, so it’s actually been operating in power-generation mode more often than it was expected to in its concept design. However, they have have been two flood seasons (in 2010 and 2020) that probably would have been much more severe were it not for the successful operation of the dam in water-retention mode.
According to the museum, it ended up paying for itself with power sales 7 years ahead of schedule compared to its original financial model, by the mid 2010s.
The museum also has cool exhibits about hydropower and floods in general and is a great visit for a certain type of nerd (me!)
Notably absent from this museum was any discussion of the social cost of building the dam, the inundation of riverside villages and towns, and the mandatory relocation of 1.3 million people. However, I would see this topic covered in great detail the next day, at the Three Gorges Resettlement Museum in Zigui County proper.
Finally, outside the museum is a park where you can check out some of the retired construction equipment used, including the massive dump trucks.
You also get a different view of the dam from the riverside parks on the south bank of the river, and again appreciate its mass. It’s nearly 6x wider than it is tall, which really contributions to the sensation of endlessness. Interestingly. the Three Gorges Dam is far from the tallest dam in the world - or even China. There are other dams in China that are more than 100m taller than this one. 3GD is notable because of the volume of its reservoir and the size of its generating capacity. The geography of the river gorges behind the dam maintain a perfect gentle sloping elevation for hundreds of kilometers, allowing for massive retention of water behind a dam that is much shorter than that of other massive hydropower projects.
After completing my site tour, I headed to my hotel in the new Zigui County (the original Zigui County is now underwater in the reservoir) and checked into my hotel on a cliff looking down over the rebuilt town, the reservoir, and the dam itself in the distance. This town was built into a cliffside to relocate the people who were affected by the reservoir without forcing them to move too far from their original location. Next time, I share some of my exploration around the town and talk about the resettlement.
In a strange way, what struck me most about visiting the Three Gorges Dam was how normal it felt.
If you spend enough time reading about it online, it starts to become less a piece of infrastructure and more a representation of an idea, or even the embodiment of an ideology. Depending on who is talking, it’s one of the greatest engineering achievements in history, an ecological travesty, a grim monument to reckless authoritarianism, a military vulnerability that’s going to drown millions downstream when it gets bombed, or an engineering disaster waiting to happen.
None of those idea-backed narratives were really present when I was standing it front of it, which was even kind of disorienting. The dam was just…there. Tourists are taking selfies and buying magnets at the gift shop. Employees are going to work. Boats are moving through the locks and the reservoir sits quietly behind the dam and it was all just normal. The concrete doesn’t know it’s the object of someone’s ideology.
I really enjoyed my visit, and I’d encourage everyone to go see this enormous thing too. But you very quickly normalize it, even in its enormity, and then it just…is. Reality is a lot less ideological than the conversations that are had about it. The world’s most famous hydroelectric project has basically completed the transition that all infrastructure should sooner or later: It has become boring.
And that’s good.