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

But when we finally reached it, we must have looked a little underwhelmed.

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"Maybe it's a little different from your mind?" fretted our Chinese guide, Stephen.

Perhaps it was the smog. But the dam looked like -- a big dam.

If the dam's appearance wasn't as dramatic as we'd expected, though, its impact is huge. As our guides explained, the government is relocating almost 1.3 million people from towns submerged by the rising waters. Red signs on the riverbanks mark 175 meters (574 feet), the depth of the reservoir when the project is finished.

Along the Yangtze, clusters of sterile white apartment buildings are rising for the displaced. Traditional market towns have vanished. At one point, we glided by a graceful old wooden temple at the river's edge.

"In 2009, that will be underwater," the guide said.

It was difficult to get a sense of the human cost of such forced dislocation. Our Chinese guides shrugged it off, saying only the elderly objected. They insisted that younger residents were happy to be part of China's boom and welcomed their bigger, government-built apartments, with plumbing and access to supermarkets.

"They have wide houses," explained Annie, a 23-year-old guide in a bomber jacket emblazoned with "London" who led us through some Luray-like caverns near the riverside city of Fengdu.

"They have a new future -- and a new TV."

Deirdre Chetham, author of "Before the Deluge: The Disappearing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges," said many young people in the cities and large towns did indeed welcome the move. Though the old towns had architecturally interesting old quarters, they also were filled with crowded, Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings from the 1950s and '60s.

"It was very exciting to get a new apartment, pick a new stove, pick out wallpaper -- for those for whom it went well," Chetham said. But for rural families, the move was more traumatic.

"They lost the land they had tilled for generations," she said. "Large numbers of people were moved as far as 1,200 miles away."