Three Gorges Dam - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 139

from the ends of bamboo poles balanced on the shoulders of bearers, who trek along among the
bicycles.
Our one excursion in Wuhan was to a restored ancient hilltop pagoda, perhaps the city's most
famous tourist attraction. On the ride to and from the Yellow Crane Tower, which was apparently
named after a mythic bird—there are no cranes colored yellow in China, our tour guide informed
us—we crossed and recrossed a road-and-railroad bridge spanning the Yangtze. Through the haze
with which we would become quite familiar, we could glimpse a newer cable-stayed crossing in
the distance, one of the many newly constructed modern bridges we would encounter as we cris-
scrossed the country.
The next day, the bus ride to Yichang was through primitive farmland. In sharp contrast to the
new cars and buses traveling the highway on which we rode, the farms showed no sign of mech-
anization. Those farmers who did not walk behind a water buffalo worked bent over in their fields.
During harvest, farmers lived in the tents and tiny shacks that abound beside the fields. Clusters
of small, run-down farmhouses marked simple villages, with virtually all buildings oriented with
their entrances facing south, in the tradition of much-grander Chinese houses. Although in the days
of collective farming there was some machinery, our guide told us, that has not survived into the
present era, when smaller plots of land are worked by individual farmers. But the state still owns
the land in China.
Since it was late in the year, there were few crops in evidence. The clearly irregular fields fol-
lowed the contours of irrigation ditches, and some worked-out fields were excavated deeper than
their neighbors to allow for fish farming and lotus cultivation. Hubei Province's great Jingbei Plain
west of Wuhan is extraordinarily flat, and after several hours' riding we had become so accustomed
to the flatness of the land that the sudden appearance of hills with terraced fields jolted many of us
out of a torpor.
The presence of hills soon yielded to mountains, which signaled our approach to Xiling Gorge,
the most downriver of the Three Gorges and thus often referred to as the third gorge. The twists
and turns of the highway through the mountains caused the city of Yichang to appear as suddenly
as new stretches of river would when we would sail through the gorges a few days hence. The most
prominent building to first come into view in Yichang was the modern China Telecom Building, the
city's tallest. It and the headquarters building of the CTGPC dominate the skyline of hilly Yichang,
which has come to be known as “dam city” and “electricity city,” in recognition of the many hydro-
electric power plants in the area.
Before leaving the Yichang area, we visited the Gezhouba Dam, completed in 1981 and a pro-
totype of sorts for the Three Gorges Dam. Located about thirty kilometers downstream from the
construction site, this hydroelectric dam has all the features of the larger structure. In particular, it
has sediment-control gates, which when opened scour out accumulated sand and silt from behind
the dam and distribute it downstream. The issue of accumulating material behind the Three Gorges
Dam is one of the objections raised by opponents, who argue that in time the reservoir will fill with
silt and become unnavigable. Impounding the silt behind the dam will also deprive the agricultural
land downstream of natural replenishment. The reportedly successful operation of Gezhouba Dam,
however, appears to have allayed immediate concern about silt, at least among engineers.