Through the Three Great Gorges rushes China's mighty Yangtze River. The towering canyon scenery is like the Southwestern United States. The steep, green, terraced banks and twisting, turning, muddy current are like Germany's Rhine. But, of course, the Yangtze gorges are like nothing else; they are a spectacle in themselves.
And they may be about to disappear. The greatest dam ever to be built on the planet is planned for the river's lower reaches. Nearly 600 feet high, it would back up the Yangtze for 360 miles, flooding 100 towns, 800 villages and more than 600,000 acres of fertile farmland. More than 1 million people would be displaced. Some would be moved higher on the canyon wall, others transported to Tibet or Xinjiang, on the other side of the country.
Construction has already begun, so if you want to see the Yangtze gorges, better hurry. But hurry leisurely -- on a boat.
The Yangtze River luxury cruise -- we'll define "luxury" shortly -- starts from Chongqing, the "Chinese Pittsburgh," so called because it is a gritty industrial city at a river junction. Fireworks pop to christen the voyage. During our four-day jaunt downriver, we stop daily along the way for sightseeing excursions and, of course, shopping.
Now then, about the "luxury." New boats have gone into service with large staterooms, saunas and Western menus. But our trip recalled the embarrassment Communist countries have always felt at the idea that some folks go "first class." So think second class: Clean and sufficient staterooms, though small and Spartan; twin beds, private bath, window. Our boat, the Xiling, named for one of the famous gorges, boasted all sorts of #F facilities: a gym, beauty parlor, solarium, video-movie corner, even a tiny swimming pool that was not in use in the August heat -- which must mean it is never used. The dining room, lounge with dance floor, observation decks and other facilities were plain and functional.
The food was quite good, and there was plenty of it, served at round tables set for 10. It's Chinese food, of course -- many dishes of meat, fish, vegetables, noodles, mushrooms, soups -- passed around on a lazy Susan and washed down with good Chinese beer. We were always eager before meals, and always satisfied afterward.
Seating at the tables is assigned by language. On our cruise there were 10 Chinese-speaking tables, mostly made up of Chinese from Taiwan; two tables comprising a French tour group, and one table -- ours -- of (11) leftovers: one Briton, two Americans, two Dutch, two Swiss Germans and a Taiwanese-Japanese family of four who lived in Paris and Singapore and spoke English among themselves. Thus English, smattered with German, became the language at our table.
Entertainment on shipboard consisted of a karaoke machine. This Japanese invention, which has now penetrated the United States and even reached Baltimore, is like a video jukebox, but instead of a vocalist there are only back-up singers and the band. The customers select songs they know, play them on the karaoke machine, take the microphone and become, for the moment, Frank Sinatra or Dionne Warwick -- on the Yangtze, no less.
Karaoke was wildly popular among the Taiwanese, several of whom fancied themselves undiscovered talents. Most of the songs were in Chinese, but there was one set of songs in English, mostly Beatles-era rock -- plus "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini," which tempted one shameless fool in our group to make a spectacle of himself. (Actually, my wife said I was, um, a sensation.)
The daily sightseeing excursions are all interesting. The first and last stops are easily told; they were the most "touristy."
The first afternoon we visited Fengdu, where some corny but charming temples and exhibits play on an ancient Chinese pun suggesting that the King of Hell lives nearby. This is ancient, not modern, tackiana, dating to the seventh-century T'ang dynasty. Walk "Between the Living and the Dead;" see the "Bridge of Helplessness" and the "Palace of the King of the Nether World."
The last morning we had breakfast in Yueyang, a 1,700-year-old river town with many claims to fame. Here Mao Zedong, in an eccentric, looping calligraphy, wrote a sad poem about alienation. Here a man sets up his sidewalk business with Q-tips and a dental mirror. For a fee he will clean your ears. Here is grown the famous "silver needle" tea that stands up in the cup, breaking the surface to exude fragrance. Silver needle tea is said to be more precious, gram for gram, than silver itself. We bought a few grams. (Silver is, after all, only about $6 an ounce.)
Between these sightseeing visits we came to know something about the river itself. Rising somewhere north of Tibet in the wastelands of central Asia, the Yangtze flows nearly 4,000 miles to the East China Sea. It is the longest river in China and the third longest in the world, after the Nile and the Amazon. Some 75 million people live along its banks and grow a third of China's
food stocks.
A torrent in color
The Yangtze is by no means a lazy river, except in its final delta phase near Shanghai, where the mile-wide current slows down in the coastal heat. Inland, forced between rock walls, the Yangtze is a torrent, conveying 2 billion tons of silt a year out of central Asia to build up the coast.
Pink the silty water is, or a rosy milk chocolate. A green tributary joins the muddy Yangtze, and the river is striped for a while. A pea-soup overcast normally shrouds the river; it is said that there are only 26 sunny days a year on the Yangtze. If so, then we got more than our share -- 2 1/2 sunny days out of four on the trip.
Waterfalls cut the canyon walls. In a village under the cliff, a string of firecrackers detonates, celebrating a wedding. Other passenger boats ply the river, and cargo barges and local traffic. Cross-river ferries, fishing skiffs, dinghies and dories -- propelled by poles, oars or small motors -- stitch together the towns and villages that cling to the banks, eking out their livelihood along the great Yangtze.
Marco Polo, the 13th-century Italian traveler, commented on the river and its traffic: "On its banks are innumerable cities and towns, and the amount of shipping it carries . . . upstream and down, is so inconceivable that no one in the world who had not seen it with his own eyes could possibly credit it. Its width is such that it is more like a sea than a river."
On the second morning, the Xiling transits the first of the Three Great Gorges, Qutang Xia. (The two other gorges downriver are Wu Xia and Xiling Xia.) At noontime we reach the Daning River, a Yangtze tributary. Passengers are moved onto small launches for a quick trip up the Daning to see the Three Lesser Gorges.
Because the scale is smaller -- an excursion boat, a narrow river -- the size and grandeur of the canyons seems even more impressive than on the main river. Far above us as we begin to putt-putt up the tributary is a bridge the height of a 30-story building, spanning the Dragon Gate Gorge. When the new dam backs up the Yangtze, a guide tells us, that bridge will be just about even with the raised water level.
When that happens, the curious square holes in the canyon walls will be under water. The holes, about 6-by-6 inches, half a dozen feet apart, have been hacked into the canyon rock for miles; we see them as we cruise up the Daning. In the old days, impassable mountains cut off the fertile, forested, empty interior of China from the populated coastal plain. As in America, it was necessary to open up the West. Mountain passes and wagon trains did the trick in North America; in China rivers were the highways into the interior.
Those square holes held wooden beams that supported a hanging bamboo towpath cantilevered out over the river. Teams of laborers hauled boats upriver against the rushing current. A thousand workers were said to be needed to haul big boats up the Yangtze.
The third day we are in Yichang, where the Gezhouba Dam taps the power of the lower Yangtze. There is a working scale model of the dam, sluicing real water, and a blizzard of statistics (biggest hydroelectric project in China, six locks 60 feet high, the project 1 1/2 miles wide, two power plants producing some astonishing number of kilowatt-hours, etc. And it will continue to produce power from the spillover of the new Three Gorges Dam, sited about 20 miles upstream.
Saving the sturgeon
Also at Yichang is a sturgeon farm. The Yangtze River is the spawning ground for nine species of sturgeon, and the Gezhouba dam, blocking the sturgeon's spawning swim, created instant endangered species.
Brainstormers came up with various accommodations. Bypass waterways to guide the spawning sturgeon around the dam didn't work particularly well. Better was a program to catch adult sturgeon on the lower Yangtze and milk them of sperm and roe, which were then mixed and nurtured in a hatchery. A million fingerling sturgeon have been released into the lower Yangtze in the last 10 years, and sturgeon's future -- so we were told -- is assured.
Well, if the sturgeon can be managed in the lower river, that is one less objection to the new dam. But there are plenty of others.
It's too big and too expensive, the critics say. In addition to destroying scenery and historic sites and displacing humans, the new dam may endanger sundry birds and beasts, including the giant panda, the snub-nosed monkey and the clouded leopard. Moreover, say the critics, though flood control is one of the
rationales for the dam, the price of evening out the river flow downstream may be a new flooding problem upstream.
So far, the Chinese government is resolute: The dam must be and will be built. The future prosperity of 1 billion Chinese -- one-fifth of humankind -- depends on the 84 billion kilowatts a year that the Three Gorges Dam would supply. Engineering studies are almost done. Construction has begun at sites to which the displaced river dwellers will be removed; some piers and pilings are already visible from the tour boats.
But it's a costly, 15-year project, and the momentum may not be unstoppable.
China bravely plans to raise two-thirds of the $17 billion construction cost the old-fashioned way, by squeezing the masses -- or as the government delicately puts it, "relying on the people throughout the country to carry forward the fine tradition of plain living and hard struggle."
Another $5.5 billion must come from abroad. But the Clinton administration has pulled its technical experts out of the project, and the World Bank warned as long ago as 1988 that the project was not economically viable.
So maybe the dam will never be built. Maybe the scenery will not be flooded. Maybe you've got plenty of time to plan your Yangtze River cruise. Then again, it's a glorious trip. Why wait?
IF YOU GO
The Yangtze cruise may cost from $400-$1,400 per person, depending on season, class of boat and direction (upstream or down) of cruise. The best weather is usually in spring or fall. Summer is hot, and low water may stop the cruises
Companies that will arrange group or individual tours include:
* Cameron Tours, 6249 N. Kensington St., McLean, Va., 22101. (800) 648-4635. A 16-day package tour with West Coast departure costs about $3,300 per person. For individual tours, figure about $150 a day in China, travel to and from the United
States extra.
* Pacific Select, 120 W. 45th St., Ninth Floor, New York, N.Y. 10036. (800) 722-4349. A two-week, five-city group tour of China costs about $3,300 per person, including airfare from the West Coast. For individual tours, figure about $600 more, reducible if you stay in cheaper hotels.
* American Travel Abroad, 250 W. 57th St., New York, N.Y., 10107. (800) 228-0877. Tour packages of two to 15 days, with optional extensions. From about $2,500, airfare to China not included.