The Three Gorges Dam

Four completion dates, and which one to use

Construction began in December 1994. After that the project has four defensible finishing dates, which is why accounts of it disagree, and the honest thing is to say which is meant.

The first generating unit came on line in July 2003, and the ship locks opened to all traffic on 18 June 2003 after a trial two days earlier. The dam wall was complete in 2006. Preliminary design and construction were completed in December 2009. The power plant was completed in 2012, and the ship lift entered operation in 2016. Finally, on 1 November 2020, the Ministry of Water Resources and the National Development and Reform Commission announced overall completion acceptance, putting the cost at over 200 billion yuan.

Two dates in common circulation could not be confirmed and are better left out: the closing of the river in 1997, and the reservoir first reaching its full 175 metres in October 2010 — a 2008 survey report has the final filling merely scheduled for 2009.

The power, and the share that is four times overstated

Installed capacity is 22,500 megawatts from 34 units — thirty-two of 700 megawatts and two of fifty. The United States Geological Survey calls it the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world, over three times the capacity of Grand Coulee and twenty times that of Hoover.

Design annual output is given as about 88.2 billion kilowatt hours by one official source and around 100 billion by another. The record year was 2020, at 111.795 billion kilowatt hours — a world record for a single hydropower station, beating Itaipu's 103.098 billion of 2016. Cumulative output passed 1.6 trillion kilowatt hours in the plant's first twenty years.

Set against national electricity consumption of 10.4 trillion kilowatt hours in 2025, the record year works out at about 1.1 per cent and a design year at about 0.85. The claim of almost four per cent is roughly four times too high. Two qualifications belong with that arithmetic: it divides a generation figure by a consumption figure, which are close in magnitude but not the same quantity, and no official body states the share, so it is a calculation from two official inputs rather than a published statistic. It also falls every year as demand grows, so it should always be read with its date.

The separate claim that this was the largest construction project in history is an unverifiable superlative and should be dropped. The verifiable superlative — largest hydroelectric plant in the world — is impressive enough and has the survey behind it.

What the reservoir covers

The reservoir runs 662 kilometres on the geological survey's figure, which is longer than the six hundred usually quoted; the two should not be averaged, and the survey's number is the one to attribute. Its surface area is given as 632 square kilometres by both the survey and NASA, though another official slide gives a thousand square kilometres as the area to be submerged and a Chinese engineering journal a water area of 1,084. The figures measure different things and the conflict is better flagged than reconciled.

What went under is specific: two cities, eleven counties and 116 towns, along with the Qutang, Wu and Xiling gorges. More than 1.2 million people were moved. Around 1,300 archaeological sites were inundated and some 8,000 unexcavated sites affected. Fengjie, a city roughly 2,300 years old, had its last building demolished before the 2003 rise, and a new city was built above the 175-metre line.

One detail is worth carrying because it makes the scale visible on the ground: markers were placed along the riverbanks at 175 metres as a reminder of where the water would reach.

The before-and-after is also in the public satellite record, from April 1987 against November 2006. The water rose abruptly in 2003 and backed up and expanded the tributaries well upstream, which is why side rivers look different too.

The lock and the lift

The ship lock is double-line and five-stage, designed for fifty million tonnes a year in one direction; a mountain was levelled to make room for it, and a passage takes about four hours. The locks handle over a hundred million tonnes of cargo a year, a figure first passed in 2011, and take vessels up to ten thousand tonnes.

The ship lift is the more remarkable of the two and is missing from every account written before 2016 — the 2008 survey report describes it as not yet built, which is a useful way of dating a source. It raises vessels of up to 3,000 tonnes through a height of 113 metres in a chamber weighing some 15,500 tonnes when loaded, carrying ship and water together as a kind of mobile lake. It takes under an hour each way against the lock's four, and it has been in operation since 2016.

On navigation generally, the improvement runs about 660 kilometres from Yichang to Chongqing, allowing ten-thousand-tonne fleets to reach Chongqing from Hankou.

How the official account frames it, and what it leaves out

The authoritative Chinese material presents the project through four functions, and the pattern is worth noticing.

On flood control, the standard of protection for the Jingjiang reach rose from a one-in-ten-year flood to a one-in-hundred-year one; over fifteen million people were protected in the floods of 2010 and 2012; flood storage capacity is 22.1 billion cubic metres, and the 2020 peak was cut from 75,000 to 49,400 cubic metres a second. On power, the figures above. On navigation, the locks, the lift and the 660 kilometres. On water supply, over twenty billion cubic metres released in the low-flow season, and the reservoir described as a strategic freshwater resource for the water-short north.

What this material does not discuss is scenery. It records flood volumes, kilowatt hours, tonnes and cubic metres, and says nothing about what the gorges look like; the completion announcement of November 2020 names no functions at all and likewise mentions no landscape. The geological survey, by contrast, states plainly that the reservoir alters the landscape of the Three Gorges area.

That asymmetry is a fair observation rather than an accusation. Silence in an engineering document is not concealment — and a different arm of the same state did describe the scenery at length, in the heritage submission below.

Earthquakes and landslides

A study by the China Earthquake Administration in 2010 found about 3,400 earthquakes between mid-2003 and the end of 2009, a thirty-fold increase in recorded seismicity, along with numerous landslides. Silt accumulates in the Three Gorges reach, and downstream biodiversity has been lost. These are findings of official bodies rather than campaign claims, and they belong alongside the generating figures rather than opposite them.

Not World Heritage, and the heritage that was moved

The Three Gorges are not a World Heritage site, and should never be described as one. The entry is "Yangtze Gorges Scenic Spot", reference 1623, on China's tentative list, submitted on 29 November 2001 in the mixed category. It covers about 193 kilometres of gorges over roughly 1,208 square kilometres, from Baidicheng to Nanjin Pass, and cites steep karst scenery, biodiversity, protected wildlife and plants, and a long archaeological record including suspended coffins on cliffs. It does not mention the dam. A tentative listing is a state's declaration of intent, conferring no designation and no protection under the convention.

Two salvage operations are worth seeking out. Zhang Fei Temple, a Qing complex commemorating the Han general, stood between 130 and 160 metres and would have been submerged; it was relocated in its entirety, and has been called the single biggest monument conservation event of the project. And the Baiheliang Underwater Museum at Fuling in Chongqing, opened on 18 May 2009 as China's first underwater museum, preserves an inscribed rock ledge that recorded the river's low-water levels from 763 AD onwards, across some twelve centuries — more than 160 sections, over 30,000 characters, eighteen carved stone fish, poems and visitors' names. The ledge lies under about 43 metres of water, enclosed in an arch-shaped vessel of purified water and reached by two underwater channels with long escalators from the bank. UNESCO has described it as the first underwater museum requiring no diving.

Baiheliang has been on the tentative list since 28 March 2008, and a joint nomination with Cairo's Raoudha Nilometer is being prepared with Egypt. No target year for submission or inscription has been announced, so it should not be described as becoming World Heritage.

For context on the scale of what remains, the Three Gorges area held 16,601 immovable and 544,799 movable relics as of 2022, and a conservation plan running from 2023 to 2035 covers a zone of 57,500 square kilometres across 26 districts and counties in Chongqing and Hubei.

Visiting the dam, and entering China

The dam is itself a visitor attraction, and a busy one: the site received over ten million visitors in five years. Within Qutang Gorge, several places older accounts name are no longer above water, among them the Ancient Pathway, Meng Liang's Staircase and the Chalk Wall, though the sourcing for that list is weaker than for the engineering record.

On entry, one date governs everything. British citizens holding standard passports could enter mainland China visa-free for stays of up to thirty days until the end of December 2026, for tourism, business, visiting family or friends, and transit; longer stays, paid work, study and journalism need a visa arranged in advance, and no extension beyond 2026 has been announced. Place of residence must be registered with the local public security bureau within twenty-four hours of arrival, which hotels normally handle at check-in.