Three Gorges: A River Runs Through It, for Better or Worse

Arriving at our ship, we wondered what had gotten into Bill Gates. The East King's decor was an exuberance of gold and red, all swirling carpets and flocked wallpaper, with the well-worn feel of an old Holiday Inn.

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Still, the ship was spotless. And the cruise turned out to be a relaxing way to see a country fast-forwarding out of Maoist isolation.

Power and the People

We entered the first of the gorges shortly before 9 o'clock the morning after boarding. Standing on the spacious observation deck, we looked out on misty mountains dotted with small pink farmhouses. In the soft gray of morning, everything felt dreamy.

"What color is the river? It's green like jade," said the Chinese guide, in her singsong English. That was no hyperbole. Spring is perhaps the best time to visit the Yangtze, before the rainy season has sent mud hurtling into the river.

Over the next 40 minutes, our ship zigzagged past rock walls that folded and fluttered like curtains. Some rippled with mineral stripes of tan, gray and black; others were carpeted with thick green scrub, wild-leafed banana trees, ramrod-straight pines. Rocks jutted out in all kinds of formations: fingers, knobs, bulges.

At times, the mountains soared with majesty. Then the passages would narrow, and we'd feel a sense of intimacy with nature.

And then it was over.

Suddenly, we were back in the modern world, with chunky white apartment buildings springing from the shore like a giant Lego project. A bridge buzzed with traffic. Workers plinked away at a shipyard.

"You have reached the real China," a guide had told us that morning. She was referring to the traditional landscape; but the reality of China is pell-mell development, even in the heartland.

Indeed, even in the quiet of the gorges, we were rarely alone. About a billion tons of cargo travel the Yangtze each year, making it one of the world's busiest waterways. A parade of barges slipped past us carrying hills of coal, a somber reminder of the country's huge power demands.

The Three Gorges Dam is aimed at satisfying that appetite for energy. When finished, it will generate 20 times as much electricity as the Hoover Dam, offsetting some of the need for the smelly, polluting coal. Chinese authorities also hope it will help control deadly floods on the world's third-longest river.

After lunch, we boarded a bus to view the concrete behemoth. The dam is typically described in superlatives: It's one of the biggest public works projects in history, longer than the Brooklyn Bridge and higher than the Washington Monument.